Come Juneteenth (8 page)

He took me on his lap as he told of rumors that certain groups of men were talking of running off in vigilante actions, to the west. Outriders, thieves, if necessary.

Mama said she didn't want to hear any talk about running off and joining a passel of rebels hiding in the hinterlands and holding out against the Yankees. That we had to get on with our lives, and if either Granville or Gabe did such a thing, she'd gather a group of ranch hands and come find them and whip them good.

Both my brothers smiled for the first time that morning.

"We have to figure out how we're going to run this place without slave labor," she said. "Some planters are talking about hiring Scottish laborers."

I loved listening to discussions like this, to the words that flew back and forth like doves between my family. I loved listening and learning. I leaned my head back on Gabe's chest, heard his heart, then heard something else.

"
Psst,
Luli, come here. Now."

The door to Pa's study was open just wide enough so Sis Goose and I could peek in without being seen.

"He's so tall," Sis Goose whispered of the man inside there with my pa.

"Yes. And handsome. Almost as handsome as Gabe."

"Why is he wearing a uniform?" she asked me.

"It's the uniform of a ship's captain," I told her. It was a wild guess, but the uniform was blue and I was sure he wasn't a Yankee.

"Luli, get away from that door." Gabe's voice floated down the hall from the dining room.

We didn't move right away. We continued peeking.

"Luli, you want me to come over there?"

If he did, what would he do? Pull me away and leave Sis Goose? Here was where it got sticky as spilled honey. She didn't have to obey him, but I did? All my life she'd been another little sister to him and now she wasn't anymore.

I backed off from the door. It was easier that way.

Just then Pa opened it, smiling, "Well, little lady? You ready to see your pa?"

"Yes, sir," Sis Goose said.

To my surprise Pa came out and gave them their privacy. I wanted to go in. I made a move toward it, but Pa grabbed my arm and said, "She can do this without you."

They were in there near an hour visiting. I went back to the table, pulled there by Gabe's look. When Sis Goose came out she was holding two packages wrapped in brown paper. Her eyes were glistening and she set the packages aside and sat down at the table with us.

"Is he going to take you away with him?" Gabe asked.

I hadn't thought of that. Only Gabe would. "No," she said shakily.

What if he wanted to?
I wondered. What rights did Gabe have? Oh, I was so confused. Then before I knew it, Pa asked me to fix a dish of breakfast and bring it into the study for Captain Smith. He was busy with some papers. And although he'd brought us a large basket filled with wine, sugar in cones, coffee beans, and a giant ham, he didn't have time to join us, thank you.

The food, it turned out, was just an excuse. Mr. Smith wanted to see me.

"I understand you've been looking after my daughter all these years," he said to me.

He wore a beard that was part white, though he was not yet an elderly man. His blue eyes were piercing but
unfathomable as the river currents he maneuvered every day. His blue coat was open and I could see that he wore a pistol, something long handled and carved.

"Some people would say she looks after me," I answered bravely.

He settled back in his chair and sipped his coffee. "I like you. You're straightforward. No duplicity about you." He smiled. "You haven't told Sis Goose yet that she is free, I hear."

This man doesn't waste time,
I thought. "No."

"Good. I was just telling your pa that I'm glad of it. There's no telling what notion she'll get in her head if she knows it. I don't need her running off with some roustabout like her mother ran off with me."

I was shocked into silence.

"You keep on being her friend," Captain Smith went on. "She'll need one in the future."

"She's my sister," I said. "I can't think of her any other way."

He nodded approvingly. "Good girl. I've brought her a fine velvet cloak for Christmas. And one for you. You can wear them together and be sisters."

Then it was over, for me at least. Pa went back in his study for more conferring. "Likely they're talking about how to make money with the end of the war." Mama never glossed over things.

I don't know why, but I expected Gabe to meet with Sis Goose's father that day. Isn't that what you did with
the father of your intended? Or wasn't he serious? Was it all one of Sis Goose's dreamed-up secrets?

I'd have to wait to find out.

T
HE GIFTS
Sis Goose got from her pa were long cloaks of blue velvet trimmed with fur. "For the day when you come aboard ship," the note read.

For just a moment I envied her. You could see, if you were blind as a skunk in daylight, how happy she was. I just didn't know how much of it was from her pa's visit and how much because of Gabe.

We had Christmas. The slaves were given the week between Christmas and New Year's off, except for feeding the livestock, milking, and gathering eggs.

It was my job, with my brothers, to give the slaves their gifts on Christmas morning when they came up to the big house to stand outside by the front steps. I stood between my brothers and now Sis Goose stood with us.

Mama insisted we wear our long blue velvet coats. And I was surprised at how much it made us feel even closer, how we giggled and smiled as we handed out the gifts.

The children got candy and small sacks of pennies. The men and women each got a new blanket and a pair of shoes.

The tradition on our place was that the holiday lasted as long as the yule log burned, so the household help made sure that log kept burning all right.

In between the festivities, the visitors, the dancing,
Pa and Mama and the boys met frequently in Pa's study, talking about what was to come in this new year of 1865.

The war would end soon now. It was only a matter of months. The slaves would be freed. "We'll not tell them about the war's end until the spring planting is done," Pa said. "I know that's what Henry Ware of Oak Grove plans on doing."

I was in on that meeting for reasons I can't recollect. But not Sis Goose.

"How many of our people do you think will stay after they're told?" Mama asked.

"A goodly amount. We'll have to pay them, of course. But I can't hit home enough with the idea that
things must stay the same for as long as we can keep them that way,
" Pa said.

Yes, we all agreed. The same as always. Until always was not just a word but a family's history and livelihood.

Things must stay the same.

I
THOUGHT
Gabe forgot, but he didn't. He called it paying your debts. He called it Southern honor.

He brought me to Granville before that visit was over and made me tell him what I thought of the lotion he'd brought home, then left me there with him, in his room, alone.

Granville's room was filled with foreign remembrances,
pictures of ships (for, yes, we had photos now), awards for seamanship, and him.

He wasn't clean-shaven like Gabe. He had a beard, dark eyes, a slight but lithe build. I was afraid of him.

As it turned out, he didn't believe in making a child work herself to death in the barn as punishment, or copy some glorious section of the Bible, or iron his shirts for a week, or write up the history of his lotion, or even in spanking. But he did believe, oh how he believed, in washing the mouth out with vile-tasting soap, the kind the ranch hands used to wash up with. After all, that's where the dirty word had come from, didn't it? And wasn't that tradition? And mustn't things stay the same?

He took me outside, out back, where there was a trough to wash up in and where I afterward threw up.

Somehow I think Gabe knew what Granville did to me. Because I caught him looking at me once in a while across the table that night with that somber and sorrowful gaze.

Granville was quietly unsorry about it. It was done.
Don't make me have to do it again. And don't go running to Ma.

I couldn't eat supper, so I didn't. "I don't feel so well, Ma. I'm kind of under the weather. I can't eat. Can I go lie down?"

She wouldn't excuse me. She knew, and she always
backed up the boys. So I sat there, green in the face and near tears.

Guilty as a deer eating Ma's daylilies, Gabe was, and wanting to make it up but not knowing how. If only I could keep him that way.

I
WATCHED
G
ABE
and Sis Goose all the time now, when they didn't know I was watching. I saw that he had special looks for her and she for him, looks that did not require words. How could I have been so blind before, thinking nothing of it when he lifted her off her horse, or his hands lingered a little longer when he helped her on?

Sis Goose and I slept in the same room, so I kept my mouth shut when she came to bed later than usual after taking a walk with Gabe.

And, lying there in my bed, waiting for her to come up, my mind would race and whirl.

Would he tell her she was free?

Did she think, now, that he owned her so he had a right to love her? Would she marry him if she were not a slave?

When would he tell her? Was he afraid that if he told her beforehand, she'd "run off with some roustabout," as her father had said?

What would she say? "I can't forgive you for keeping me in bondage. I can't marry you, Gabe."

"Take care of her," Gabe admonished me when his holiday furlough was over and he left for Fort Belknap.

If he didn't have to wait for the circuit preacher to come through, would he have wed her before he left? I recollected how antsy my sister got waiting for that preacher before she married in December of 1863.

Now it would be at least two months until Gabe came home again. If he could get away. And who knew when, after that.

A
S IT TURNED
out, it was March when he again came home. The end was coming. Soon General Lee's line at the James River at Petersburg and Richmond would have to be abandoned.

"He doesn't have enough troops to hold off Sherman in the Carolinas," Gabe told us. "I've asked to be sent to help, but it turns out our frontier here would be abandoned to the Indians, and I'm afraid they don't care who wins the war. They just insist on being a threat."

Mama was distraught. She hugged him. Who was worse, she tried to decide, the Kickapoos or the Yankees?

With Gabe home, Sis Goose once again was coming up to the room long after I had gone to bed. I would lie there waiting for her, wondering just when it was that things had changed between her and Gabe. And what would become of it.

The night before he left again for Fort Belknap, Sis Goose came in especially late. Actually, it was near morning. Where had they been?

Late the next morning, Gabe saddled up and bid
good-bye to us all, telling me to take care of Sis Goose, who stood to the side with tears in her eyes.

That afternoon I went, as I did most days, to take a plate of supper to Edom in the log house that Grandpa had built.

"Nice warm fire," he said, stoking it with a poker. "Burned all night long. He kept it burning."

"Who?" I asked. But I knew instantly, even before he answered.

"That young brother of yourn. Gabe. In here with that woman of his near the whole night."

So. This is where they had stayed. How stupid of me. Of course. All the privacy they wanted here. Edom slept in the back room.

G
ABE WAS
back at Fort Belknap when the war ended. We kept the ending from the slaves as well as we could.

The vegetable and flower gardens were planted. All the fences were mended. Fertilizer was put in the fields. But it wasn't enough.

The cotton must be planted. So must the wheat and corn.

All the slaves were set to work. Pa, usually a wonderful host, deliberately cut off contact with anyone on the outside. He wanted no news of war's end, no hint of freedom to reach our slaves until he absolutely had to tell them.

Was it right? We didn't discuss it. Did they suspect? They had no outside information, not even in the slave
grapevine, because Pa forbade the visiting back and forth to other plantations, even by men or women who had wives or husbands there. And they had Sam the overseer's cooperation.

We became a country unto ourselves.
Did it matter?
we asked ourselves.
Who would be hurt with a couple of more months in bondage?

I am sure God has that question written down in a dark book in gold print somewhere.

P
A HEARD,
through his own connections, which he did not even tell Mama about and which she didn't ask him, that the Yankees were finally coming in June.

We think he had something to do with the commission of men sent to New Orleans by Governor Pendleton Murrah to make peace terms with the Yankees.

The men asked if the slaves could remain on their plantations until the crops were gathered. The Yankee officials said no.

On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger issued the Emancipation Proclamation for Texas. Exactly two years and five months after the slaves back in the states heard of it.

"Sir." Sam the overseer, faithful to Pa up until then, came to the big house to see him. "Sir, I can't hold out no longer. They's bound to find out and if'n you doan tell 'em soon, I'm afeared they'll all walk off from you. If'n you do tell 'em and ask nice, I think you got a good chance of havin' many of 'em stay. With some agreement, of course."

Pa trusted Sam and agreed. And so he stayed locked in
his study all day and would take no vittles. Nor would he answer the knocks on the door. Mama finally got Sis Goose, whom I suspected he favored as much as me, to knock on the door and call in, "Mister Holcomb, sir? I have your coffee. Just the way you like it. And some ham and biscuits."

Maybe he was just starved. Maybe he'd lost track of time, drawing up the freedom order to be read to the slaves. He let Sis Goose in. And he kept her with him the whole afternoon, asking her how the order read, sounding it off her. Then he said, "And where will you stand when the order is read, child?"