River to Redemption Page 2

  “Adria. Well, ain’t that got a pretty sound?” Matilda pushed Adria’s hair back from her face.

  “I’d best be about what needs doin’. An’thing you need ’fore I go, Matilda? Do I need to see to them up the stairs?”

  “They’re all ’bout the same except Mr. Harrod. He’s took a turn for the worse. Wouldn’t even try to sip the water I give him.” Matilda put the glass to Adria’s lips again.

  Adria held the water in her mouth for a few seconds before she swallowed. She didn’t get sick.

  Louis sighed. “I’ll give him a look when I get back.” The big man leaned over Adria. “I’ll see you later, missy. You’ll be fine with Aunt Tilda here. Like I tol’ you. She’s got healin’ hands.”

  After Louis left, Matilda brought a pan of water and sat on a stool beside the cot to wash Adria like her mother did Eddie. Adria started to tell her she could do that herself, but she wasn’t sure she could. Besides, she liked letting the woman take care of her. She didn’t have to think. She just had to lie there and do whatever she said. Turn this way. Hold up her hand. Sip this water. Suck on this bit of ginger candy.

  Matilda talked the whole time. Words upon words. Some of them sounded like they might be out of the Bible and then sometimes she sang a few words. Her voice wasn’t pretty. Not like Adria’s mother’s voice when she sang while she worked in the kitchen. But there was a comfort to the sound, and while the old woman was washing her toes, Adria fell asleep. She knew she hadn’t slipped off to glory because there in her dream Matilda’s voice went on and on. It didn’t sound a bit like an angel.

  When Adria woke up, she didn’t know what time of day it was. Without a window, it was hard to tell. A lamp burned on the table by the bed and the door was open into the kitchen. The kitchen had windows, but Adria couldn’t see them from the cot. She thought about getting up, but her legs felt good there under the warm cover. She wasn’t shaking any longer and her stomach wasn’t hurting. Her heart still felt funny, but that might be because she wanted her mama and not have anything to do with the cholera.

  Something was on the pillow beside her. Something soft. She sneaked a hand out from under the cover to pick it up. Callie. The doll her mother made for her. She had black yarn pigtails and light brown buttons for eyes. To match Adria’s brown eyes and dark hair. The doll’s dress was yellow, and Adria had a dress just the same until she got too big for it. Adria hugged the doll close and squeezed her eyes shut. A couple of tears slid out and down her cheeks anyway.

  Voices drifted back to her from the kitchen. Matilda and Louis. Adria opened her eyes and shifted a little on her pillow until she could see Louis sitting at the table, his arms hanging down beside him. Her daddy looked like that sometimes when he came home from working at the sawmill. He said he had to rest up some before he could pick up a fork to eat.

  “You looking worn to a frazzle, Louis.” Matilda sat a bowl in front of the man. “Eat some of this stew. You got to keep your strength up.”

  When he didn’t move, she went on. “You ain’t getting sick, is you?”

  He shook his head slowly. “No’m. But there’s times I can’t help but wonder if them that are laying out there on Cemetery Hill ain’t the lucky ones.”

  “It’s a sorrow burying all them folks. A burden on you.” Matilda put her hand on the man’s shoulder for a few seconds. “Digging all them graves. How many now?”

  “Forty-eight counting this new one.” He looked over his shoulder toward the little room where Adria lay, but she shut her eyes quick so he’d think she was sleeping. When she opened them again, he was staring down at the bowl in front of him on the table.

  “Just one?”

  Adria couldn’t see Matilda now, but she could hear pans clanking.

  “I wrapped them all up together and put them in one of the boxes Mr. Joseph made ’fore he left town. He didn’t put no name on it and it seemed the thing to do. This way I can tell that little girl in yonder I done proper by them. Let them stay a family.”

  Adria held Callie tighter against her chest. Her heart hurt bad. Maybe she should be in the box too.

  Louis picked up a spoon and ate a few bites. “How’s she doing?”

  “Sleeping. Normal like. Best thing for her. I’m thinking she weren’t as sickly as most. Not like you and me and completely clear of it, but easing past it fine enough. I’m fixing some broth for her.”

  “I tol’ her you had healin’ hands.”

  A chair scooted on the floor in the kitchen and then Adria could see Matilda’s arms on the table across from Louis. She couldn’t see the woman’s face.

  “Is the dyin’ letting up?”

  “I’m thinkin’ it might be.” Louis blew out a long sigh. “Ain’t that many left in town to die.”

  “But if it’s lettin’ up, then folks’ll be comin’ back to town when they hear the bad air is gone.” Matilda’s hands came across the table to take hold Louis’s arms. When he looked up from his food, she lowered her voice, but Adria could still hear her. “Could be time for you to head out. Go find your freedom, Louis, whilst you have a chance.”

  “What you talkin’ ’bout, Matilda? I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  “They say it ain’t that far to the river and once you’re across you’re in freedom land. Easy as pie to get on up north where the slave hunters can’t go. Me, I’m done too old to try it, what with my rheumatism and all, but you, Louis. You’s young and strong.”

  Louis jerked back away from her. “You’re talkin’ nonsense. I do just fine here workin’ for Massa George. He treats me right.”

  “You think because he give you the keys to this hotel here and told you to look after things whilst he took off to escape the cholera that he’s treatin’ you like a white man? He didn’t know you wouldn’t be bothered by the bad air here. I ain’t sayin’ he didn’t hope you wouldn’t die, but that ain’t no credit to him. You’re his slave. That’s all. That man were to fall on hard times and need money, he’d sell you in a minute.”

  Louis put down his spoon and stared at the table, his shoulders slumped. Adria held her breath, waiting to see what he might say. She knew about slaves, even if her family didn’t have any. Her mother said that was for rich people. Not them. But sometimes they paid Mrs. Simpson to let her slave, Viola, come over and scrub the floors. Most all the black people in Springfield belonged to somebody. So she wasn’t surprised to know Louis did too.

  When Louis started talking, Adria had to strain to hear what he said. “I ain’t sayin’ you ain’t right, Matilda. And I ain’t denyin’ that freedom seems like a happy road that I might like to someday travel. But the Lord, he done tol’ me to stay right here and do what needs doin’ for all these folks, black and white. If’n I tried to run down that freedom road right now, I’d be goin’ against the Lord, sure as anything. He kept me free of the cholera, and I reckon that’s all the freedom I’ll be gettin’ right away.”

  Matilda’s hand came back across the table to pat Louis’s arm. “You is a good man, Louis Sanderson. I hope someday the Lord will reward you for what you is doing.”

  “I ain’t an unhappy man. Leastways I wasn’t ’fore ev’rybody went to dyin’ around here. Good times’ll come back to Springfield soon’s we get past this hard spot.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe so.” Matilda got up. Adria heard her stirring something, the spoon clacking against the side of an iron pot. “What we gonna do with that child in there? She got any other people?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if she don’t?”

  “Then the good Lord will help us figure out what to do. He won’t desert a little child like that.”

  “He done took her parents.”

  “He’ll supply. Ain’t that what the Good Book says? The Lord will supply our needs.” Louis pushed back from the table. “I got to go see to the horses.”

  When Adria heard Matilda coming toward her little room, she shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep, but she didn’t fool Mati
lda.

  The old woman sat down on the stool beside the cot. “You can stop squeezin’ your eyes so tight shut, child. You don’t have no reason to be fearful. Ain’t nobody gonna hurt you with me and Louis around.” She gently wiped a tear away from Adria’s cheek. “Leastways no more’n you already been brought low by the cholera.”

  Adria opened her eyes then and looked straight into the old woman’s brown eyes. “I’m an orphan, aren’t I?” Her teacher at school, Mr. Harmon, had read them a story about an orphan last year. The story made her cry for the girl with nobody to love her.

  “That’s a sorrowful word, but not one you need to dwell on. Now eat some of this broth to get your strength back.”

  Adria sat up and let Matilda spoon the soup into her mouth. “I don’t want to be sent away. Can’t I just stay here with you?”

  “Well, no, child. Folks wouldn’t let that happen. A slave woman takin’ in a white child. Besides, that wouldn’t be no life for the likes of you.”

  “But what’s going to happen to me?” Adria clutched her doll closer.

  Matilda sat the bowl of broth down and moved closer to wrap her arms around Adria. “Now don’t you fret. The Lord will provide.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t rightly know, but Louis, he said so, and that man has the good Lord’s ear.” Matilda settled Adria back on the pillow. “We’ll just have to wait and see what’s headed our way, but come tomorrow when you is back on your feet, you can help me make a cherry pie. That’s the thing about God’s sweet earth. Even when folks ain’t doing well, the Lord keeps puttin’ fruit on the trees and lettin’ the beans in the garden grow.”

  “I like cherries.”

  “’Course you do. They’s a sweet gift from the Lord to us.” Matilda smoothed back Adria’s hair with her bony hand, but somehow it was still a comfort. “Now, if’n you knows any prayers, you might be whisperin’ some of them your own self. For a better tomorrow.”

  She waited until Matilda went back in the kitchen and then she held her doll up close to her mouth. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep,” she whispered.

  She stopped there. She didn’t want to pray about dying before she woke.

  Three

  Ruth Harmon was in no hurry to go back to Springfield. The town held nothing for her now. Peter was gone. Dead at age twenty-five. Their dreams of a family gone with him. Red-headed, freckled-faced boys for him. Blue-eyed, blonde girls for her. She used to tease him that their daughters might have his red hair and the boys might be fair and blonde like her.

  Peter would laugh at that and promise to love their babies even if they had no hair at all. Then he always added that he had no doubt at all their girls would be beauties like their mother. He did love her. And he loved children. He was a schoolteacher, after all, and so eager to have his own children to teach.

  She felt the same. They’d been married a year, and every month she hoped to be with child. Then in May she had the first indication of that perhaps being true. Peter was so happy. He had picked pink roses out of who knows whose yard and brought them to her. They hadn’t shared the news with anyone else. It seemed better to wait until her rounding figure gave proof of a child on the way. Even so, they were dancing on air. Their dream of a family was coming true.

  But cholera turned their dream into a nightmare. The disease swept into town on the summer winds. Bad air, some said. Others blamed it on the rotting vegetables and fruits people pitched out of their kitchens. She supposed garbage could cause the bad air, but no matter what the town officials did, they couldn’t stop it once the first person sickened in town. It swept through the houses, striking down young and old alike. Some lived. Many died.

  The cholera wasn’t only in Springfield. All across the state—all through the country, in fact—the grim reaper came in with the scourge. People ran from cholera, leaving towns deserted and the sick to manage however they could. Doctors died along with their patients. One after another. Quickly. Sometimes only a day after the severe symptoms set in. Hardly time to properly say goodbye.

  Peter insisted she leave him and escape to the Springs Hotel on the other side of the county. The air would be good there. The waters healing. He could take care of himself, he said. He’d be there, recovered, when she came back. She had to think about the baby.

  She hadn’t left. Not until he went beyond her. Closed his eyes and refused to open them. Refused or couldn’t. Once his breathing stopped, she did think of their baby. Heaven forgive her, but she hitched up their little buggy to the high-stepping pony Peter was so proud of and left her beloved husband stretched out on their bed. She did not hang black crepe over the windows and have a funeral for him. She didn’t even see that he was properly buried.

  She left him there and ran away to where the cholera wasn’t. For the baby. Then the baby ran away from her. Gone in the fresh hours of the morning. Perhaps there had never been a baby. Only a dream. Now grief hung heavy over Springfield as people trickled back into town once they heard the cholera had run its course.

  Some of them had more to come back for than Ruth. She had nothing. Only the rooms she and Peter were renting until they could get a house. A schoolteacher didn’t make much money and often as not got paid in bartered goods. Jars of honey. A side of bacon. A sack of potatoes. The county officials sometimes made a big show of pitching in a few dollars to keep the school building in shape, but the families of the students were expected to support the teacher. Some did. Others with the means sent their boys away to schools in bigger towns and their girls to the Loretto School run by the nuns. Ruth had gone there herself. Maybe she should consider going there again. Converting to Catholicism and taking vows. But such vows were not to be taken simply because one had an empty heart.

  As soon as she got back to Springfield, even before she went to their rooms, she drove her buggy out to Cemetery Hill. New mounds of dirt with grass only beginning to sprout on some of them lined the edge of the graveyard. Many more than she had expected in spite of the news reaching her at the hotel of this or that person succumbing to the cholera.

  She’d also been told who had taken care of the dead. George Sanderson’s slave, Louis. He’d been untouched by the cholera, but as she stared at the dozens of graves, she doubted that was true. He might not have come down with the sickness, but no one could be unaffected after digging graves for so many.

  Her heart grew heavy when she saw no markers stuck up out of the fresh mounds of dirt. How would she know where her Peter lay? She wanted to tend his grave, plant flowers to show he was loved. And now he was just one of many. She bent her head and tried to pray. Peter would want her to pray. Before the cholera, she’d found whispering prayers easy, as natural as breathing.

  Thank you, Father, for your blessings. Thank you, Lord, for the food we have. Praise you, Lord, for the beauty of your world.

  But now, the prayers came hard, wrenched out of her heart with desperate tears. Why, Lord, why? Peter was a good man. Why didn’t you spare him? Why?

  She knew it was wrong to question the Lord. But why ran through her thoughts and would not be shut away. Surely it was better not to pray at all. Best to push aside the questions and get on with life. But she had no idea what to do next.

  Her brother had a farm in Ohio. Her mother had gone to live with him after Ruth married Peter. She promised to come back after Ruth had a house, but then she had died. Everybody died.

  There was still her brother. He and his wife had three children, but they would make room for her. They were family. Even so, she would be a burden. She was too young to become a burden. Better to find a job to support herself. She was capably educated. Peter once told her she would make a better teacher than he. And now that she was single, she could get a teaching position. Go west perhaps and live with first one student’s family and then another. That’s how schools were on the frontier. Or perhaps she could go to Louisville or some other big city and find a position as a clerk.

&n
bsp; Thinking about it all made her heart hurt. Made her feel empty. She was empty. She raised her head again and looked out over the graves. None empty. Each mound covering someone’s loved one.

  She was turning back to her buggy when a black man and a little girl came through the cemetery gate. The man held the child’s hand. The girl had dark curly hair, but she wasn’t black. The soft mumble of the man’s voice drifted across the graveyard to Ruth, but she couldn’t make out any words. Neither of them noticed Ruth there. The man kept his gaze locked on the child while the little girl stared straight ahead, obviously uneasy, even frightened, to be there among the dead.

  A cemetery full of fresh graves was no place for a child, and a spark of anger flared inside Ruth. Where were the child’s parents to allow such a thing?

  When the man looked up and saw Ruth, he bent his head quickly, but not before she recognized him as George Sanderson’s slave. The one who had buried the cholera victims when no one else could or would because they were too sick or had fled the town. Fled as she had.

  The child looked up at the man when he stopped walking and turned loose of her hand. “Is this it?”

  Ruth heard the distress in the words.

  “No, missy, but there’s another here we don’t want to be a bother to. We’d best come back another time.”

  The child looked at Ruth and then back at the man beside her. “No. Show me now. She won’t care.” The girl stepped away from the man, closer to Ruth. “Will you, ma’am? Louis is going to show me where my parents and little brother are buried. That’s important to know. Aunt Tilda says so.”

  Ruth knew the little girl, but her name wasn’t coming. Poor child left alone in the world, the same as Ruth. “Yes, you should know.”

  The child stared up at Ruth. “You’re the teacher’s wife.” When Ruth simply nodded, the child asked, “Did he go to glory too?”

  “To glory?” Ruth said.

  “That’s what Louis said. That my family went to glory.” The girl looked back at the black man. “That’s easier to hear than—” She stopped and swallowed hard before she went on. “Than other things. Glory is heaven, you know.”