San Antone. V. J. Banis

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СКАЧАТЬ Jay could not exactly love his mother, he could often feel sympathy for her: Staying on top of everything was a heavy responsibility, he’d discovered that already for himself.

      He felt a real pang the day she went to pay a call on Mrs. Montgomery. She had her chin thrust out and up, the way she did when it was something she really didn’t want to do, and she walked as if her black velvet dress were made of chain mail. Watching her from an upstairs window as she walked, ramrod-stiff, down the steps to the carriage, Jay Jay could easily imagine her going off to face fire-breathing dragons—which, funny enough, you could never picture their father doing.

      Jay Jay admired pride greatly, it was something he just seemed to understand by instinct. Yet when his father, waking late, asked where she had gone, Jay Jay, who certainly knew, pretended ignorance. “She just went out,” he lied. “She didn’t say where.”

      He felt ashamed of himself later; he hated lying, and worse yet, he couldn’t imagine why he had gone and told such a pointless lie.

      He felt so bad, he would have to think of some really terrible way of tormenting his brother to work himself out of it.

      * * * *

      Joanna felt, too, as if she were going into battle. Since that fateful night of the hurricane, she had seen Alice Montgomery briefly on two occasions—at the funeral services for Clifford, and in court, when Alice had told her version of what had happened that night. Joanna had not approached her or spoken to her either time. The ugly memory of Clifford’s assault and the horror of what had happened subsequently were still too fresh in her mind. And she could hardly suppose the woman wanted reminding of her loss, in the form of the one who had killed her husband.

      Still, decency did dictate a call before they left Galveston. If they ever left Galveston. She had begun to wonder if they’d ever be ready. So much to be done, and redone; so many details, so many delays.

      The weather grew hot, and hotter still. “Unusual for Galveston,” Lieutenant Price would say, mopping his brow with his kerchief.

      The gulf breeze withered in the heat and died, leaving a flotilla of ships frozen into immobility in the harbor. Work on the wagons slowed very nearly to a standstill, and supplies for which they waited did not come.

      So, on a day when even the passing hours seemed to hang suspended, too wilted to move along their way, Joanna dressed in her “severest” dress and went to see Alice Montgomery. She would not have been surprised if Alice refused to see her altogether. But the little colored girl who answered the door—unfamiliar to Joanna—said, “I’ll see,” and disappeared into the shaded confines of the house.

      Joanna waited on the veranda, behind a curtain of bougainvillea, and in a short while Alice herself came through the screen doors.

      “Joanna,” she said, “this is such a surprise.”

      She looked—well, different, Joanna thought, though she wasn’t quite sure just in what way. Her first thought was that Alice was already going to pieces; you heard of women doing that when they lost their husbands. A wisp of hair had escaped from the tightly coiled bun atop her head; in the past, a fidgeting hand would have been continually trying to put it in its place, but Alice appeared oddly unaware of the miscreant. Her face was bare of the customary rouge and powder. She looked, in fact, frowzy.

      At the same time, though, she seemed completely unharried. Her smile, while it was still hesitant and shy, was less strained than it had appeared before, and her eyes, for the first time since Joanna had known her, seemed to look out of her face at you and not around some invisible corner. Indeed, were it not for her black outfit and the widow’s weeds pinned to her bodice, Joanna would never have suspected the woman was so recently bereft, and she found herself wondering if perhaps the widow had been consoling herself with some sherry.

      “I felt,” Joanna said, “that I had to come see you before we left Galveston. We owe you so much, and, of course, there’s what happened....”

      For a moment, Alice looked at her as if she didn’t remember exactly what had happened. “Oh,” she said, looking far less embarrassed than Joanna felt. Unexpectedly, she said, “I was just sitting in the garden—it’s so much cooler. Would you like to.... No, no, of course, you wouldn’t.... Let’s just sit out here on the veranda, why don’t we? It gets just as much breeze as the garden anyway. If we had any breeze—though I swear, you can’t get the air to move even fanning it. Eliza, bring us some nice cool lemonade, won’t you? You will drink some lemonade, Joanna?”

      “Yes, that would be nice.” To cover her confusion, Joanna asked, “Is that a new girl?”

      “Yes, the other one ran off—a whole passel of them did, right after Mr. Montgomery’s accident. I expect they thought there’d be no one to come after them. Lord knows, I don’t mean to, not in this weather.”

      “Ran off?” Joanna was surprised. In South Carolina, a runaway slave was enough to rouse every man in the county to pursuit. Most of those who tried were caught, and the punishment was brutal, but that had never stopped an occasional effort.

      “Oh, they’re going in droves, people tell me. It’s that Mr. Lincoln and his talk of freeing them; it puts ideas in their heads. Leaving good homes where they’re treated like royalty, and like as not they end up eaten by the Apaches. I don’t know where they think they’d go—Texas is Texas, from one end to the next, is what I always say. Oh, here is our lemonade. Doesn’t that look cool and delicious? Eliza, dear, give Mrs. Harte the glass with all that ice you were so extravagant with.”

      Joanna took the proffered glass with a polite “Thank you,” and sipped on the cool liquid. The ice, large chunks of it, tinkled and glittered in the dappled sunlight. It was strange—with everything else, she had all but forgotten President Lincoln, and the threats of war between the states. In that regard, at least, Lewis had been right: All that seemed so far away.

      Or it had, until she’d been reminded. But the peculiar thing was, so far as she knew, they had lost no slaves.

      “Now, Joanna, I want you to know, I harbor no bitterness. You did what you had to do, protecting your husband and all; any woman would have done the same thing, I’ve told I don’t know how many people already. And after what happened, too. I don’t wonder you were half out of your mind. Why, I think that I myself would have.... Well, what’s done is done, I always say.”

      Joanna was astonished; she had never suspected the woman sitting opposite her of any grace in concealing her feelings.

      “That’s very kind of you,” she said. “It has been preying on my mind, the thought that you’re alone now because of what I.... Will you be all right, Alice? Have you family?”

      “Oh, back in Georgia, what’s left of them. I think I told you, I come from Savannah, but it’s been so many years....” She paused, looking beyond Joanna, beyond the bougainvillea, her eyes suddenly dreamy and young-girlish, as if for a moment she had shed a great many of her years. “I was fourteen when I married.”

      “That’s very young.”

      “My papa was a gambler. He gambled away everything he had—his money and his horses, and the stock, and even his home. Finally he had nothing left to gamble away but his daughters.” She sighed and gave her head a shake. “Fourteen. I swear, I don’t even remember what it was like being that young, it might have all happened to some other girl.”

      It came to Joanna out of the blue that this woman wasn’t concealing her feelings СКАЧАТЬ