“I kept your secret all this past year, John. Come sit a spell with me, and tell me how you are.”
“I can’t see how that concerns you, Miss Pauline.”
I settled myself on top of a pile of clean straw, and the cow wandered back outside, so after a minute of standing there with his fists clenched, he sat down an arm’s length away from me, eying me like I was part rattlesnake.
“You went away,” he said.
“I did. I have people up the mountain, and I went back to stay with them. I thought it might be perilous to stop on here for a while. I’ll bet you’d have left if you could have.”
He nodded. “I used to dream about it. Only in my dream, it would be me and Laura astraddle her daddy’s mare, heading up that mountain that looks like it rises up out of the woods behind the back pasture. Reckon I’ll never see those mountains up close now.”
I took a blade of straw and twirled it between my fingers. “People forget, John. A year has come and gone. Give it another one or two, and nobody will even mark your absence. You are a free man, ain’t you? Go as you please.”
He leaned back and pointed out the barn door and up at the sky, where a full golden moon was just coming up over the ridge. “See how big the moon looks when it rises? Looks like it’s almost touching the ground. When I was little, I used to think that if you climbed to the top of the mountain, you could touch it. But one night I climbed all the way up the ridge, and when I got there, the moon was as far away as ever. Now, I reckon freedom is like that. You think that if you just go someplace else you could touch it, but when you get there, it will still be a million miles away.”
“You and Laura might have made it, if you went far enough out west to where they don’t care about such things. Indian Territory, maybe.”
“Well, that is past praying for. Laura is dead and gone. And I am thinking that once the harvest is over and done with, I will get away from here. At least then I won’t have to look at that ridge where they found her buried. Maybe I could sleep better then.”
“Where would you go?”
“The Andersons have property over the county line, at German’s Hill. I thought I might do some sharecropping on my own over there, if Mr. Washington is willing to let me try. I think he will. It’s only Caldwell County-not over the mountain, not Indian Territory, but maybe I can start living again there. Find me another woman.”
I smiled at his foolishness. “Another gal like my cousin Laura?”
“No!” He hit the straw with his fist. “As little like her as ever was. I have done with that. I’ll find me a good steady woman of color, who can help me tend a farm, and make a life over there, where we don’t have to sneak around in fear of our lives.”
It was like listening to James Melton all over again. The Foster women seem to have the power to bewitch a man, like the fairy queen in the old ballads, but sooner or later, he wakes up on a cold hillside, with a handful of dust and ashes, and after that all he wants for the rest of his life is a plain ordinary woman who will share his burdens, instead of a moonshine maiden who gives you dreams and leaves you with nothing.
The moon had climbed higher than the ridge now, and it was so dark in the barn that we both looked like shadows. I leaned back in the straw, feeling drowsy and peaceful. Neither one of us said anything for a while. Then I heard John sigh, a heavy, weary sound like a tired old horse.
“What?”
He sighed again. “It’s just that you put me in mind of Laura, sitting there in the hay like that, all in shadow. You favor her.”
“Laura and me were blood cousins, so we ought to.”
“I’ll miss her until the day I die.”
I thought the day he died might have come sooner if she still walked the earth. I didn’t say that, though, because I was mindful of what I had come about. So I leaned close to him in the soft darkness of that summer evening, and I put my hand on his shoulder and leaned close. “She was mighty lucky that she had you to make her happy, John. I never had anybody.” I made my voice quaver, and it was too dark for him to see that I shed no tears. Before he knew what was happening, I was in his arms, and then I just let nature take its course. He called me “Laura,” and I never said a word, just went on kissing him and running my hands over his body. Never saw a man yet that didn’t take to rutting given half a chance. He wasn’t but twenty-two or so, and Laura had been dead a year and more. By the time he remembered himself, it was too late to matter.
He turned his back to me when he was done, and I thought I heard him crying softly in the dark. I left him be for a minute or two, while I righted my skirt, and picked straw out of my hair. Finally, I said, “Tom Dula is getting a new trial around harvest time. And then Ann will have her day in court. And I reckon you know more than anybody about what really went on that day.”
“I know Laura wasn’t running off with Tom Dula. It was me she came to meet. I never told anybody, though.”
“See that you don’t. I reckon you know what would happen to you if people knew about you and Laura.”
“I know. But they already sentenced Tom Dula to hang in that one trial. If the next court does the same thing, they’re going to kill him. And he’s an innocent man. He had no call to kill my Laura. None at all. I keep thinking I should tell somebody that.”
I leaned in close again, but there was no softness about me this time. “You won’t tell anybody anything, John Anderson, for if you do, it’s you that will hang.”
He tried to pull away, and I could hear the bewilderment in his voice. “But-but-I never harmed Laura.”
“No. But I can’t have you trying to save Tom. I want him to hang.”
“But why? Are you aiming to save your cousin-Miz James Melton?”
“Well, no, John. I want them both to hang. And if you try to stop it, I’ll see that they lynch you, no matter what. I’ll tell them you raped me.”
I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I heard him draw breath, and he shuddered like he’d touched a snake. “Somebody should have killed you,” he said.
I laughed. “Why, I’m just a servant girl here. People hardly notice me at all.”
When the fall term of 1867 rolled around, wouldn’t you know it, this time it was the prosecution that wasn’t ready. They claimed that some of their witnesses had not turned up. That there Colonel Grayson from Tennessee was one of the missing witnesses, and I wasn’t surprised. A whole year had passed, and by now he must have thought he had better things to do than to travel all the way to Statesville to watch a bunch of North Carolina attorneys waste everybody’s time with their legal shenanigans. I hear they fined him eighty dollars, though, for not attending. I wonder if they ever collected it.
They finally had that second trial on January 21, 1868, and mostly the same witnesses went all the way to Statesville to say their piece again. But there were a few changes. In the corridor outside the courtroom I saw Eliza Anderson, Wash Anderson’s younger sister, decked out in her Sunday best.
“What did they call you for?” I asked her.
She doesn’t care for me overmuch, and I reckon that’s because her brother has been tale-bearing, but she answered me civil enough, “Nothing very important, I’m sure. But we live next to the Bates’ place, and I suppose the prosecution called me on account of that.”
I thought it was odd, because her brother was already down as a witness, and could have answered any questions about that, but I didn’t think too much about it, for my mind was occupied with my own testimony, which was a deal more important than hers.
She went into the courtroom while I was still waiting in the hall, wondering if the court was planning to give us lunch. Presently Miss Eliza came storming out of the courtroom, looking like a wet hen.
“What happened to you?”
“Where is my brother?”
“Outside having a smoke. I said I’d fetch him if it was his time to go in. What’s the matter?”
There was a pink spot on each one of her cheeks, and her lips twitched. “That awful man who is defending Tom Dula asked me… actually, in public… asked me if I was kin to-as he put it-‘a man of color’ named John
