"Tessie Peckenpaugh, if you dishonor yourself in that beggar's line for Yankee charity I shall never speak to you again!"
"Beatrice!" Tessie shrieked as if a long-feared ghost had sprung up in the street to accost her. Standing in the charity line with a hundred or more other Savannahians, Tessie was as shabby as any; her old bonnet, with a fresh camellia japonica pinned to the side, was like a wilted rag on her head—albeit her frayed garments were of the finest cloth. Beatrice had been sharing her home with the "old maid of Savannah" every since Sherman and his bunch left Savannah three years ago, his departure followed a few days later by a hellish fire that destroyed half the downtown area before sweeping into adjacent residential sections and burning homes—one of them, Tessie's.
Tessie immediately abandoned the crushing line, and hurried toward Beatrice, her shoes—broken open at the arches, and split across her bunions—visible beneath her swaying skirts as she stepped off the sidewalk and rushed into the street to lean against the ancient old barouche in which Beatrice Corrigan sat—rod stiff, and scowling down at her. Before war and famine arrived, the luxurious but ancient barouche and the single old mule harnessed to it would have been a laughable thing to see, but no one was laughing at such sights these days. Today, atop each of the two plush back seats was a stack of cherry wood chairs, six to a stack. On the floorboard between them, a small cherry wood tea table lay on its side.
"Oh Bea ... don't be angry with me, Please! I haven't tasted sugar in ages! And today they are adding to our weekly ration of bacon, molasses, and cornmeal. ... a sack of flour and a pound of sugar! Heaven only knows when they will be so generous again!"
"Tis Yankee charity," Beatrice spat. I would rather starve before I put a drop of their begrudged offerings in my mouth!" She jerked her hands from Tessie's grip. "Shame on you, Tessie Peckenpaugh! Next, you will disgrace yourself by opening your doors to that despot Sherman himself, should he visit us again!"
A woman, identified as Northern by her handsome new attire, and with a small daughter clinging to her skirts, eyed Beatrice with hostility from the sidewalk. "Excuse me, madam..." the woman said, her eyes steely with indignation, "General Sherman and our armies did naught but their duty to divest our country of its bands of rebellious revolutionary—or rebels, as you are commonly known—but it sees their lot still exist ... and my husband has brought me here ... into a most ungrateful nest of them."
Beatrice bristled. She jerked her head at the woman, her flat little straw hat doing a dance atop her silvery bun. Her lips pursed and then spread into a tight smile. "I am a rebellious revolutionary, eh?" Her eyes narrowed and her smile widened. "Well, I am most pleased to agree with you, Madam, but lest you assume too much, I shall inform you that I have always been a "rebellious revolutionary", as were those of my ancestors who once fought to divest this country of English tyrants Who also cloaked their greed in laws that benefited only themselves. And if you knew your history, Madam, you would know that this county of yours and mine is a land created by rebels, and would not exist were it otherwise."
The woman's uniformed husband stepped away from his sentry post alongside the charity line and quickly escorted her and his child away.
Beatrice scowled at them, still convinced, like most Southerners, that the abolishment of slavery was not the North's only intention, as they systematically destroyed the South. War had been the only way they could dismantling and then destroy a superior financial system—riches gained through the South's independent trade with Europe. That the radical government in Washington had simply used the Abolitionist to implement their goal was a belief as irrefutable as the Bible itself to Southerners. Still glowering, Beatrice stared down the street at another Union soldier and his family. The wife gripped the hands of two little boys while the soldier carried a small daughter on his shoulders. Good Lord! We are being newly invaded by entire families of them!"
Just then, one of Savannah's very own ladies rushed up to the couple and began to chat amiably with them, smiling and gesturing at them, as if they were the crème de la crème of Savannah society! Beatrice's eyes bulged with rage—the woman was none other than her very own seamstress before the war! Sewing for the Yankee infiltrators now, was she? Very well! No Savannah lady of any merit will ever again waste an ounce of breath on that simpering wench! I shall see to it!
Two of Beatrice's old tea and cakes brigade, Bethel Truett and Prudence Hornden abandoned the line and approached, shouting Beatrice's name and waving their arms in greeting; one clutched an empty basket, the other an old bucket, just as empty.
"Look at them," she said to Tessie and growing even more hostile as she watched the pair approach, "begging bread from the Yankees! I never thought to see this day when my own kind would-!" Silenced by Bethel's and Prudence's unsuccessful attempts to embrace her, she raked up a handful of newspapers from the seat, and shook them in their faces.
"Have you not read these?" she cried, glaring. "They are Northern papers, every article gloating over their victory and ridiculing the South's hunger, chiding us for accepting their charity! Here! Read this!" She shoved a paper into Bethel's stunned face but then jerked it back. "I shall read it to you," she snapped. "This..." she wagged the paper, "is the New York Times describing one such spectacle right here in Savannah and such as is taking place this very instant." She pointed at the needy crowd. "Listen to this, you people ... here is what the Yankee's enjoy about our misery." She stood in the cart and began to read, her voice loud and resounding, carrying to the fringes of the hungry-eyed crowd:
"Rome, in the time of carnival, can exhibit no such spectacle. There are two doors to the store, one on Bay and the other on Barnard Street, affording entrance and exit. Several hundred persons of both sexes, all ages, sizes, complexions, costumes; gray-haired old men with canes, with bags, bottles, and buckets; old "Uncle Neds" who just before death gives them liberty from hardships and suffering are made freedmen by the mighty march of events; well-dressed women, wearing crepe for their husbands and sons who have fallen while fighting against the old flag, stand there with pale and sunken cheeks, patiently awaiting their turn. There are women with tattered dresses—old silks and satins which were lain aside as useless but which have become valuable through destitution." Bethel and Prudence tugged at their attire as if such smoothing action could transform rags into their old elegance. "There are women in linsey-woolsey, demi-white women wearing Negro cloth, Negro women dressed in gunny cloth; men with Confederate uniforms, men with butternut clothes. There is a boy in a crimson plush jacket, made from what was once the upholstering of a sofa. There are old men in short jackets, little boys in long ones—the cast-off overcoats of soldiers, the rags which have been picked up from garrets—wearing the boots and shoes which have been kicked off and thrown aside, down at the heel, out at the toes, open on the instep. There are old bonnets of every description, some with white and crimson flowers, some with ribbons once bright and flaming but now faded and worn."
Beatrice paused to draw a deep, ill-tempered, breath. Tessie, Bethel, and Prudence's eyes were upon her, sad with reminisces. Several women in the crowd wiped their cheeks with tattered shawls; one dropped her basket and moved slowly away. Beatrice continued: "There are Shaker bonnets, "Sugar scoops," "coal scuttles," hats of every description, size, and shape worn by both sexes—women wearing men's hats of palm-leaf or felt, men wearing stove-pipes battered and bruised, felt slouched and torn, ventilated by accident and not by patent ventilators. There is one which had no crown, worn by a man who had red hair, reminding one of a chimney on fire and flaming out at the top."
Beatrice's voice rose in studied fury with the next. "It is the ragman's fair rather than the ragman's jubilee and day of rejoicing, for Charity, like a kind angel, has suddenly stepped in to ward off the wolf which is howling at the door."
An angry male voice interrupted from somewhere in the line. "The Northern dastards feign to feed us, yet rejoice that we starve!"
Beatrice's old mule shied backward a few steps before she ferociously jerked him still, her voice rising with increased fervor. "There are teams in the street—old, dilapidated wagons—weak, broken-down horses and sorry mules with rope harnesses." She nodded wryly at her own sorry mule. "It is a collection of odds and ends. It is literally a distribution of the bread of life. In no profane sense, but in truth and reality, it is a sacrament, given freely, and I doubt not gratefully received. The recipients, at any rate, are eager to partake of it—so eager that the sentinels at the door at times are compelled to present their bayonets to the crowd to keep the passage clear."
"Damnation upon them!" a woman's voice cried as she threw off her stained slouch hat, shoved past the Yankee sentry, slung her empty basket at his feet, and stomped away.
Beatrice nodded her pleasure, her eyes falling quickly back to the newspaper. "There will be some who fail to receive the aid they need—persons who have never known want who will suffer silently rather than mix in the crowd which throngs at the door. Others will obtain provisions when they have abundance at home." Finished, she crumpled the paper into a ball and hurled it into the street.
Tessie capped her old friend's tirade with loud sighs of agreement. Jerking at the tattered shawl that hung from her bony shoulders like a frayed strip of gauze, she imitated Beatrice's hostile gaze at their two companions.
"Well, I never!" Prudence said, her layered chins jiggling, her round face growing even rounder in furious but speechless defense of herself.
Bethel patted Prudence's twisting fingers then bustled closer to the cart. "Beatrice Corrigan, how dare you judge us when, for the past two years, you have had your granddaughter's new husband providing your needs! Most of us are not so fortunate as that." She raised her bosomy chest in a manner that could only be seen as confrontational. "And as for tolerating the Yankees and thereby keeping 'the wolf from the door,' I have bequeathed to our veterans and youths any wasteful bitterness I might have had toward our conquers, for only they will live long enough to nurture it! I shall not live that long, Beatrice Corrigan, and nor will you! Come Pruddie, old Mister Habersham is holding our place in line."
Beatrice did not bother to watch them march away; she slashed the mule viciously across his rump and jolted into the street, causing a rickety wagon to swerve from her path, its sway-backed horse showing a spurt of energy by rearing his front hooves a few inches off the sandy thoroughfare.
Tessie, running alongside, struggling to keep up, finally halted. "I shall be home soon, Beatrice! See you at tea time?" she called out, adding, "Where on earth are you taking those chairs, Beatrice?"
Tessie cried out twice more and, without looking at her eternal house guest and protégé, Beatrice gave a nod, not bothering to reply that she was on her way to Greenpoole and would be gone overnight—a command appearance, of sorts.
She glanced over her shoulder at the charity line. That Bethel! Even without Gentry's generosity, no Corrigan—nor her own Cuthbert lineage, who had sold their property and left for England soon after the war started—would ever please this Yankee riff-raff by showing neediness! Indeed not! Suddenly she was glad that she had refused the horse and buggy Gentry wanted to buy for her, keeping, instead, the oddly stunted mule that had wandered onto Greenpoole's property one day. Meshach had mended the fancy old barouche that she and her dear departed husband had purchased in their youth—and which the Yankees had evidently not wanted when they stripped Greenpoole of its vehicles and every last animal on the place, including the slow-moving plow oxen, of which they had probably roasted and ate! Despite her resentment, Beatrice was not unhappy with her transportation: The old mule and barouche allowed her the respectability of equality among her peers—Savannah's genteel citizens of society whose two hundred-year fortunes had washed away beneath a relentless tide of blue coated mercenaries, massive in number.
On the outskirts of town, Beatrice tapped at the ache behind her bosoms, then yanked at a dangling thread. Her last lace blouse was in no better shape than Tessie's sad-looking old shawl. And when, for God's sake ... is the woman going to discard that disastrous hair-piece bun? Even before the war it was no more than a snarled ball of mousy brown fuzz, and now it looked as if a family of mice had actually made it their home these past years. Starvingmice, no doubt.
* * *
Old Baker Ben, his black face as stoic as ever, slowly made his way across the dining room toward Beatrice seated at the head of the table. His long thin hands, sinewy beneath skin the color and texture of old leather, gripped a large silver tray atop which sat a small two-layer cake without frosting or sauce. The silver tray and silverware was salvaged from the cave beneath Corrigans' Pool by Meshach and Cricket, who had hidden them from Sherman's men in '64. The servants still laughed at how the Yankees, finding no sliver in such a magnificent plantation home, had dug up half the property looking for it. Ella did not laugh—they had found plenty else to cart away. Baker Ben sat the cake in front of Beatrice, and she eyed it grimly.
"Don't tell me it's that time of year again," she said, and glowered at the old servant, then adding, "I thought you were getting so old and feeble you would forget all this silliness."
Honor laughed. "We reminded him to make the cake, and without frosting, just the way you like it." Honor gazed fondly at the old servant who had pampered and spoiled her throughout her childhood. "But he hadn't forgotten at all," she said. "How could Baker Ben forget your birthday, Grandmother, when his very own is on the same day? As many as those cakes as he's baked over the years, I bet he even knows how old you are."
"I doubt that. How old am I, Baker?"
"You is eighty-three this day, Miz Bea," he replied and then, haughtily, "and I is ninety-three, aimin' for a hundred and-three."
Gentry, Andy, and Honor laughed, but Ella, have chosen to sit between her and Gentry's son Adam, and Honor and Andy's Elizabeth, only manage a counterfeit smile. She ate very little of the rare chicken and dressing Baker Ben had prepared for the occasion, and now she scarcely heard the drone of voices and light laughter as, upon finishing the meal, the others conversed. Oh, but surely Gentry didn't mean it! He was just angry ... frustrated, as she was, with the slow progress at Greenpoole, but if he would just be patient...! A moment passed before her shoulders slumped. He meant it ... meant every word of it! Suddenly she stared at her hands in her lap; pain alerting her that had been wringing her fingers like a piece of wet laundry.
War had done away with many things in the South, but left unscathed were traditions of family and one's station among one's kin. That being so, after supper Beatrice executed her dominion as matriarch of the family by tapping her spoon against her glass signaling that all should follow her into Greenpoole's sparsely furnished parlor, where they would have their tea and cake. She had parted with the dozen chairs and tiny table, but her sofas, settees, and other fine household items—collections over the past sixty years of furnishing and refurnishing first Greenpoole and then her house in town—were still in the attic of her Savannah home, all covered with sheets or packed away in crates and boxes. Therefore, Gentry and Andy helped the twins, Moonbeam and Sunbeam to lug the chairs across the massive marble-floored entry hall and into the parlor where the small tea table sat.
Ella did not sit with then, but sat on the floor, entertaining the children by reading Two Doves and the Owl to them, until she got to the part where a naughty old owl came along, killed the mother dove then flew away with the two baby doves in his clutches. She closed the book, suddenly remembering how she had detested that story as a child, and had cried when Grandmother read it to her. She was grateful when Adam and Elizabeth, unable to sit still for long and wanting to play, jumped up and darted out into the entry hall, their shrill screams and laughter soon echoing through the great house and drowning out the adults. Hannah appeared from out of nowhere and, unhampered by her girth, chased the unruly duo into a corner, and then marched them off to bed.
Later, after Honor and Andy departed for upstairs, Gentry took Beatrice's hand and politely excused himself. When he kissed Ella's forehead and she neither spoke nor responded, Beatrice eyebrows shot upward. She waited until Gentry disappeared through the doorway before she spoke. "The last time I saw you ignore your husband like that, you were married to Victor Faircloth. What has happened?"
Ella closed her eyes and shook her head. A moment later, she was sobbing quietly into her hands.
"Well...," Beatrice drawled, "the honeymoon lasted a lot longer than I thought it would, you being so stubborn about leaving this place."
"You knew! You knew he wanted us to go to Texas and didn't tell me!"
"It was not my place to tell you. None of my concern."
"It's none of your concern that he wants to take me and your great-grandson away, far away, to a God-forsaken place so far from home that you may never see us again?" She arose from the sofa and marched to the window. "Or has he convinced you to sell out and come with us," she said, her disgust evident.
"Ha!" Beatrice retorted, not trying to hide her amusement at such a notion.
"I thought so," Ella nodded, turning. "I don't want to leave my home any more than you, Grandmother."
"But you will leave it." It was a factual remark rather than a question. Beatrice approached the window in time to see Gentry riding off toward the Savannah road. She glanced at Ella. Gloom had overtaken her granddaughter, and Beatrice waited for her to speak.
"He is willing to wait only until the last crops are in," Ella finally said. "That's little more than a month from now," She turned to face Beatrice, her expression miserable. "How can I leave behind all I've cherished my entire life? All I've ever needed was my home ... my family ... Greenpoole." She did not attempt to silence the next burst of sobs.
"Beatrice patted her shoulder. "You will do better than you think."
Ella jerked away. "No I won't, and I don't want to." She wiped angrily at her eyes. "I pray to God something happens to stop us!
"Be careful of such prayers, my dear, because-"
"...because I just may get what I pray for? I hope so! I hope my prayer will be answered, and I don't care how!"
"Ella, except for me and Honor, the family you speak of is dead and gone. Honor and Andy will soon find another way of life, one they are eager to undertake. I am certain Greenpoole will always be in their memories, but they will not allow their feet to be frozen to Greenpoole's soil in a useless search for the past."
"It isn't useless, not if we work together! Honor never had sense enough to care about Greenpoole the way I do. She still behaves like a spoiled child, and Andy is worse ... running off to town every chance he gets ... to curse the Yankees when their back's are turned, he and his friends plotting revenge they could not possibly accomplish without being caught and hung!"
"I don't condone Andy's kind of bitterness. It will only cause him trouble. But aside from his hatred of Yankees, he and your sister have sense enough to know that life, as we knew it, is finished and will never return. Honor has the good sense to know that her obligation is to Andy and little Elizabeth, not to a dead past."
Ella clutched Beatrice's hands, shaking them with each word, "But if we work together, we can turn a profit at Greenpoole, Grandmother. I know we can. Greenpoole is our home!"
"Gentry and little Adam should be your only concern, Ella, not Greenpoole."
"My son and husband are my concern, but so are you and Honor. This land and this house was the pride of Corrigans for nearly two hundred years, and...! Oh, Grandmother, I thought you, of all people, would understand!"
"I understand better than you know," Beatrice said, and Ella was surprised to see her grandmother's eyes glisten unnaturally for a moment before she continued speaking. "I think I told you once before that the happiest years of my life I spent with your Grandfather here in this beautiful old house, raising our son, and later, watching my grandchildren be born here. I often chastised your father for spoiling you both, but I was as guilty as he. More and more I look back and realize that I was shamefully remiss in the council entrusted me after your mother was so horribly injured in that accident. I should have taught you so much more than I did. I should have prepared you for a world I knew would someday collapse. Instead, I gave you entitlement—the same as was given me—when I should have given you vision, vision to see further than the tips of your noses."
After Beatrice went upstairs to bed, Ella stood on the veranda, staring into the dark night and thinking of her grandmother's words. Vision to see what? Vision to see herself living out the remainder of her life in a strange land—tales about which made her cringe. In a few short weeks, she'd be forced to desert her beloved home and forced to reside, like a trapped animal, in a place she knew she would hate. Oh, God! If only something would happen to stop us from leaving! Beatrice was wrong—nothing could be as bad as leaving Greenpoole!
