Secret Tides Page 6

  Then York swiveled suddenly toward Ruby. “Turn around, woman,” he ordered sternly. “You will forget what you saw today. That clear?”

  Josh wished once again that York didn’t act so hard with the servants.

  “I know my place,” Ruby said. “What white folks do ain’t no business of mine.”

  “Exactly,” said York. “Just keep it that way.” He spat off the side of the wagon.

  Ruby jumped from the wagon and moved to the roadside, where the trees offered some shade. There she stopped until the wagon had moved several paces ahead. Then she started walking again, her pace just fast enough to keep up with the wagon.

  Josh faced forward as York settled back into his seat. Josh tried to calm his mind. At times like this he didn’t like his half brother, didn’t like how he put him in such a hard spot. Not wanting Ruby to hear, Josh leaned close to York. “You aim to keep that money, don’t you?” he whispered.

  “Least for now, I do,” York said. “I already said that.”

  “Your conscience won’t gnaw at you for it?”

  “I suppose it might. But I can pay that price for the amount of money in that box.”

  “You expect me to keep your secret?”

  York pushed back his hat and stared at Josh. “I expect so.”

  “What if I won’t?”

  “You’re my brother,” he said. “Friend too. Hate for that to end.”

  “Something like this can prove mighty hard to keep quiet. What if the man who shot you comes looking for that money?”

  “He don’t know who I am,” said York. “And we don’t know for certain he even knows about the money.”

  “But he could come.”

  “Yes, he could.”

  The wagon bounced down a slight hill, then started pulling up again. “This is one of those moments, don’t you think?” asked Josh.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like you said earlier. An opportunity. A time a man’s got to grab or let go forever.”

  York grinned. “Yes, I see what you mean. It’s like this just fell right into our laps. Good luck from the sky.”

  Josh licked his lips. “It’s hard to pass it by. I got to admit that.”

  “You changin’ your mind?”

  “No, don’t think so.”

  “You let me know if you do,” said York. “Anytime you want your half, you got it. You know I won’t cheat you. You want it, I’ll hand it over.”

  Josh clicked at the mules, but they ignored him. He clicked again, more insistently this time, and flicked the reins on their backs. This time they actually sped up a little, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe, if they moved fast enough, they might get him back to The Oak before he yielded to the temptation to join York in his plan to keep the money for himself.

  Chapter Four

  Leaving York with Ruby and the wagon about a half-mile from the manse, Josh split off and headed through a stretch of unplowed fields, toward his house. The sun had just about disappeared, and a slight nip hung in the air in contrast to the heat of just a few hours ago. He knew Anna would have supper ready by now but would hold it for him to return before letting anybody eat. He smiled as he thought of his family—the Lord had blessed him more than most men, men like York who had never found any luck with love or happiness with women.

  Thinking of York, Josh tried to figure a way out of his current predicament. He’d feel guilty if he just let York keep the money. But how does a brother, even if just half, put another brother in trouble especially when that brother already had some struggles in his background that would make it even worse?

  The heaviness of Josh’s heart lifted a little as he neared home. Although it strained him with its demands, his labor on The Oak pleased his soul. Growing rice agreed with him, the way it took such a regular method to make it happen. The steadiness of it all—what to do in this season, what to do in that one—satisfied something deep in Josh. It matched up well with the nature of his mind, the order in things he liked to see.

  The vast rice fields of The Oak lay along the banks of Conwilla River, the fresh water rising and falling with the flow of the ocean tide that pushed it in and out every morning and night. Banks of wood and earth about eight feet wide at the base and three feet high—what they called check banks—allowed him to flood the fields separately from each other on a regular schedule. The hard labor of the field hands built the banks with great precision and kept them up by constant care, clearing the ditches and drains with hoes and shovels.

  During the winter, the servants plowed the fields and dragged them with a harrow to break up the earth and keep the field flat—a necessity for growing good rice. In April they sowed the seed for a new crop, pressing the seed into balls of wet clay and then drying the balls before putting them into the ground.

  After the sowing, they immediately flooded the fields, keeping them wet until the seed pipped or germinated, a step that usually took somewhere between four to fourteen days. After that, they drained the fields, hoed them for weeds, and kept them dry until the young, needlelike rice plants formed rows across the field.

  Then came the flooding again, a series of water flows that gave the rice protection from weeds and provided all the moisture it needed to grow strong. Finally, the harvest flow of water came—the flooding occurring in late summer, after the rice plants had grown to about fifteen inches. This flood supported the stalks until shortly before the harvest that started in late August and lasted usually until almost the end of October.

  Everybody worked at a frantic pace in harvesttime—from sunup until late at night. A couple of days before the harvest, they drained the water from the fields and sent in the field hands to cut the stalks with sickles—rice hooks they called them. After they’d cut down the stalks, they left them in the fields to dry for a couple of days. Next they stacked the stalks in ricks about seven feet wide, twenty feet long, and as high as a man could make them. When all the rice was cut and dried, they hauled it away to a mill on a mule-drawn cart or a rice flat—a flat-bottomed barge. After milling the rice, they stored it in barrels made of pine and banded with birch and white oak hoops. Each barrel carried about six hundred pounds of rice.

  Lots of things made the work hard—stifling heat, swarming horse flies, field rats and mosquitoes, the danger of malaria and yellow fever. For Josh, though, the sight of a smooth field of swaying rice in the middle of a gentle flood of water made it all worthwhile. He liked the ebb and flow of it, the way it connected to the ocean, the way it tied to all things natural He could just see God smiling down upon it all.

  Josh breathed in the fall air as he reached his front yard. About a half-mile from the manse, his house was a four-room square home with plank floors and one shuttered window on both sides of the front but none in the back. Oak trees surrounded the house on all sides, the moss off the branches, like an old woman’s gray hair, almost touching the ground. Chickens darted across the well-swept yard as he walked up, and a brown cat with a missing left ear raised his head and meowed at him from the porch.

  Josh stepped up onto the porch and scratched the torn behind the ears. “Evening, Copper. Everybody busy with supper?”

  Copper didn’t answer as Josh moved to the door. Noise erupted from inside the house at the sound of his feet. A couple of seconds later three kids rushed him as he opened the front door.

  “Hey!” Josh called as he bent to pick up Lucy, the youngest of his children at six. Lucy wrapped her arms around his neck, and Butler grabbed him by the arm and tugged.

  “Whoa there,” said Josh, leaning against Butler, his seven-year-old. “Let me get in the door.”

  “Stella came over,” said Butler, all out of breath. “Late yesterday. Said she got news.”

  “What news?” asked Josh.

  “News from the manse,” shouted Butler.

  Josh eyed Beth, his eldest at nearly ten, who reached over to give him a hug. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “It can wai
t,” said Beth. “We got other troubles. Mama’s got the headaches again. She’s restin’ on the bed.”

  Josh’s face fell. Beth’s brown eyes were dark and sad. A quick grief ran through him. Sometime in May of the past year, Anna had started suffering off and on from rough pains behind her eyes and over her ears. At first she tried to ignore the hurt and keep on working. But then the headaches got more regular and more painful.

  “It feels like somebody put my head on a road and ran a wagon over it,” she moaned to Josh one morning as he sat by her, a wet rag in hand for her head. “It hurts bad.”

  Josh did all he could to make her comfortable, but not much seemed to help. He got York to call in a doctor from Beaufort, but the doctor didn’t know what to do about it either.

  “Might be the heat,” the doctor had said as he ran his fingers over her head, checking her temples and behind her ears. “Sometimes women especially can’t take how hot it gets. She take any knocks on the head or anything?”

  “Not that I know of,” Josh said.

  Anna shook her head.

  The doctor peered into her eyes. “What goes on in the head isn’t known to man or beast. A true mystery, that’s what it is.”

  “But you’ve seen this before?”

  The doctor shrugged. “People with headaches, yes. Some come pretty regular; a few people get them so bad they have to go to bed with them.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Now that’s the hard question,” said the doctor. “One thing that works for one won’t work for another. But here’s what I’d try. Put her in a quiet place when the aches come on her, out of the light. Keep her real still and quiet. And give her a tablespoon of this when she first starts hurting … more if it helps.” He handed Josh a bottle of dark liquid.

  Josh took it, opened the top, and took a sniff. “What’s in it?”

  “Don’t ask,” said the doctor. “Let’s just see if it eases her some.” The doctor shook Josh’s hand and walked out.

  The next time the headaches came, Josh started Anna on the dark liquid. It did seem to help some, but to Josh’s grief, it didn’t completely cure the pain. And, over the last couple of weeks, the aches had gotten even worse. Now, as he stared at Beth, Josh wished he knew what else to do. Other than the dark liquid and his constant prayers to the Lord for help, he felt totally helpless.

  “How long has she been down?” Josh asked Beth, walking with Lucy and Butler wrapped around his knees toward the back room where he and Anna slept.

  “Since this mornin’,” said Beth. “She rose, put out some food for us, and brought in the eggs. That was it. The headache hit her, and she headed to the back.”

  Josh patted Beth. “Sorry you have so much on you. I know it all falls on you when your mama’s hurting—the cooking, cleaning, and caring for the young ones. I wish I could aid you more.”

  “Don’t worry, Pa,” said Beth. “You got your work. Not a lot of time to fret about mine here. I’m almost ten, old enough to help. We all pitch in, we’ll get it done just fine, you’ll see.”

  Josh smiled but only for a second. Beth had grown up fast. Guess that happened when a mama took sick and you were the oldest. Unfortunately, since the nearest school was almost in Beaufort, Beth hadn’t received any education either, except for what little Josh had been able to teach her.

  He reached the bedroom and peeked in the open door. Anna lay on the thin mattress of their bed, a wet rag over her face, one bony arm over her chest, the other across her forehead. Her thick hair, the color of a penny, lay spread out on the pillow, and her face, always thin, now looked drawn, as though somebody had stretched it past its going point.

  “Go on now,” he said to the kids, putting them down. “Let me talk to your mama.”

  “You gone kiss her, Pa?” asked Butler, a shy grin on his face.

  Josh smiled at his boy and ruffled his hair. “I just might. I missed your mama. Need a kiss real bad. Now leave us alone so I can get that kiss in a proper way, without such an audience.”

  Butler grinned again, and he and Lucy shuffled away. But Beth stayed. Josh again saw the worry in her young eyes. He took her by the shoulders and pulled her close. “I know it’s hard. But your mama will get well soon. It’s probably just the hot weather. Now go on with Butler and Lucy. They need you.” He squeezed Beth once more. She sighed and left.

  Alone now with Anna, Josh sat down by her in a straight chair and took her hand. “I got home,” he said quietly, “a few minutes ago.”

  She stirred, lifted the rag, and opened her eyes. A tiny smile crept to her lips before pain rode it. He knew she was in agony. “I’m glad you’re home,” she whispered. “You keep things lively around here.”

  He kissed her forehead. She handed him the rag, and he dipped it in a water-filled iron pot on the floor. Patting her face gently with the wet rag, he said, “Sorry the aches came again. You take the tonic the doctor left?”

  “Some,” she said. “But you know it makes me droopy, and I don’t want to sleep too much. Can’t keep up with the children that way.”

  “Beth takes good care of the little ones,” he said, laying the rag on the floor. “You know that.”

  “She’s still a little one herself.”

  Josh hung his head as Anna rubbed his hand. Anna’s hands were so small, like the hands of one of the porcelain dolls he saw in a store window in Charleston almost every time he went there. He’d noticed her hands the first day he met her in Savannah back in midsummer 1848, right after he got back from the Mexican War. Josh remembered the months after he and York returned from the fighting. Although they’d ridden back from Texas together, they’d split up soon after, with York going to Charleston, and Josh to Savannah. Josh was the one who had insisted on the split.

  “I came straight to you after Mama died in ‘46,” he’d said in an effort to explain. “But now I need to see if I can make it on my own.”

  “But we ain’t been together but a couple of years,” said York.

  Josh nodded. York’s mama and pa had lived together without ever standing before a preacher, and she had died giving birth to him. His pa, a man who kept the livestock for a rice planter on a plantation near Georgetown, had married about four years later. Josh came from that union after his mama failed to deliver three other babies. By the time Josh was born, York was already twelve years old. When their pa passed on from the consumption four years later, York, almost seventeen at the time, left to seek his own way. Although half-brothers, they hardly knew each other when Josh’s mother died and he went to join York just before the war. Now maybe they knew each other too well. York’s gambling and drinking cut against a lot that Josh believed in, and Josh tended to stay too strait-laced for York.

  Thankfully, York hadn’t argued too much about them going their separate ways, and Josh was glad. York reminded him too much of the war, especially of the one thing that continued to haunt Josh with guilt in the dark of night. True, he was glad he knew his brother better now, but the war had caused Josh to do things he wanted to keep buried. With York around those things stayed alive.

  He’d met Anna in Savannah after the war; had spotted her hands in the small store she and her pa and two sisters ran there. He had stepped into the store to buy some leather to make a new belt. Anna, a year younger than him, had cut the leather for him, her fine hands wielding the knife with more strength than he thought possible for such fragile features.

  She had smiled at him and wished him a good day as he paid for the leather. After he’d stepped outside, he realized he needed to buy something else too, although he didn’t know for sure what that was. Back in the store, he bought three buttons, not because he needed them, but because the buttons happened to be in the glass case right by the spot where Anna stood. After paying for the buttons, he decided he needed some flour. By the time he’d bought the flour, he’d somehow managed to find out her name and where she was from.

  Over the next three months, he found a whole lot of re
asons to go back and buy things from her store. By the time fall rolled around, he told her that if he didn’t marry her soon he’d end up broke from spending all his money at her store! Since he didn’t want to do that, would she please marry him so he could get out of debt?

  To his great joy, she said yes, and they married three weeks later. Although not his first choice as a place to settle, Josh had taken work repairing ships in Savannah’s harbor so Anna could stay near her folks. Over the next six years all three of their children were born. To everybody’s sorrow, however, her pa died near the beginning of 1854, and the sisters got into a squabble about who got what of their pa’s business. Discouraged by all the bickering, he and Anna agreed that maybe the time had come for a fresh start. Since York had asked him by letter more than once to come help him run The Oak, they decided they’d do just that. They moved there in the fall and settled in.

  “The trip to Charleston go okay?” Anna asked, bringing him back to the present.

  “Yes, we loaded up the wagons with provisions for the winter. Brought home a woman for Stella to train for the cookhouse.”

  “Stella’s getting creaky. She could use the extra help. York stay out of trouble this time?”

  Josh smiled. “I kept him close at hand, made sure he stayed sober.”

  Anna patted his hand. Josh started to tell her about the episode at the creek, to ask her what he ought to do. She always gave him such good advice. He wanted to ask her how to make York give the money to Tessier. Yet he feared bothering her, feared it would make her head hurt worse.

  “Stella came out,” she said, breaking his thoughts.

  “Butler told me,” he said, deciding to wait until she felt better before telling her anything about the dead man and the money. “What’s the news?”

  Anna closed her eyes again. “Tessier. He’s dead.”