"Southern aristocracy" aptly described
southerners like Ella Corrigan and her family of Savannah,
Georgia—five consecutive
generations happily sharing and building the family riches, while residing in
unbound luxury on their ancestral Savannah River
plantation. However, marriage to the murderous Victor Faircloth ended Ella's
happiness, and soon afterward war between the North and South ended her riches.
Through it all, she both loved and hated another man, the stranger from Texas,
Gentry Garland, the man she had first thought to wed—had he not made love to
her then immediately left town. Overcome with shame that she had surrendered
her virtue to a man she scarcely knew; she married the emotionally secretive
Victor Faircloth. Four years later, on a forever-haunting day in 1864, Victor's
drowning in the Savannah River might have been
Ella's blessing ... had he been her only loss.
Now three years later in 1867, the America's
Civil War has been over for two years and Gentry Garland has been back in Ella's
life for three—her hard shell of bitterness crumbled away by his love and his
wiliness to do anything to make her happy ... which is why he is living with
her at her cherished Greenpoole Plantation outside Savannah, Georgia ... and has
all but abandoned his Texas ranch.
However, Gentry is having second thoughts....
Chapter
One
Gentry Garland
stood on the bluff overlooking Greenpoole Plantation, his sunburned face void
of emotion, his black eyes unreadable. Only the rapid drumming of fingers
against his leather-encased thigh gave way his turbulent thoughts: It was time
to tell his wife that the Georgia home she so revered was not for him ... would
never be for him. Even had the war not changed things in the South, this place
would not have been for him; he had been foolish to think it could be. He had
been even more foolish to let love for his wife over-rule his common sense.
Ella's dream of restoring Greenpoole to its old splendor had become his
nightmare, and he was tired of pouring "good money after bad"
He lit a thin cheroot and tossed the match
over the bluff into the river. As beautiful as Ella's Greenpoole plantation on
the Savannah River still was in many ways, the
scars of war and poverty were everywhere. The end of slavery meant the end to
prosperity to planters such as the Corrigans ... an end to "the old days" that Ella,
and others like her, spoke of with such longing. Her sharecropping adventure
with her freed Negroes—trading crops for labor—was a failure that she refused
to acknowledge. Her share of those crops was never enough to pay the bills. Blind
to reality, she and fellow planters refused to see the hopelessness of their
efforts: Southerners across the entire South were starving on a new diet of
higher and higher taxes; their land, animals, and goods of all types,
confiscated for nonpayment. Conditions were the same in Texas for ex-Confederates and their
supporters. Disenfranchisement—men stripped of their voting rights—left
Southerners no voice. Without the vote, there was no sane way to fight the
injustices leveled by land grabbing Northern politicians and their crews of
profiteers. As proof that injustice, whether real or perceived, often bred
insanity in those prone to violence, clandestine societies of mostly ex
Confederates sprang up in nearly every Southern community ... with bands of
hooded men on horseback terrorizing black and white alike, setting ablaze crude
wooden crosses ... hanging and burning terrified Negroes, as well as their white
sympathizers.
Gentry wanted no part of this postwar
turmoil. He had fought for neither North nor South and, like many Texans who
clung fiercely to their individuality; he considered his isolated land along
the winding Guadalupe
River a perfect divide
from both arguments. There, he and his little family could be lost from the
rest of world if that's what they wanted ... all the while prospering from a
new inventive—trailing, and then selling, his thousands of longhorns at distant
markets like Abilene, Kansas where the animals were fetching fifteen to
twenty-five dollars per head.
He had returned to Texas four times in the past two years to
sell off more and more of those cattle and horses—all to keep Ella from losing
Greenpoole. With each brief appearance at his ranch, his vaqueros and their
families eyed him with unspoken questions, undoubtedly wondering if he had gone
loco. Only the ten-year-old boy, Erasmo, had the gumption to speak up. "Is it
for your bruja far away, Senor Garland that you must sell these cattle?" he
said, his innocent brown face naked with concern. "Mama says that soon this
bruja will have you sell the ranchero also, and we will have no more work and
no more roof above our heads." Gentry had not scolded Erasmo's parents, whose
conversations the boy had obviously overheard. But before Gentry left again for
Georgia, he told Erasmo that
someday he would bring his mujer to Texas
and the boy would then discover that she was an angel, not a bruja ... an angel
who had bewitched him long ago.
His heart had not changed. Not even was his
love diminished by his mounting disgust for his wife's delusions about
Greenpoole—it was only his spirit that had been diminished, leaving him with a
feeling of cravenness he had never before experienced. His reaction was silent
anger, and with each passing day, he became more aware of his effort to
restrain that anger.
His foul-mouthed old friend, Hempstead Grouse
back in Texas,
said he was the worst kind of "whupped" that can happen to man. "And out of
respect fer your lady, Gent, I won't mention
the part of her anatomy what's got you so goddamned whupped." Had any man,
other than old Hempstead made such a remark,
he would have landed on his back in the dirt while spitting out a mouth-full of
bloody teeth. But Gentry knew if he struck the wiry old desperado turned
lawman, odds were he would just have to go ahead and kill him, for the
bad-tempered old cuss would have done his best to kill him.
Anyway, Gentry doubted if Hempstead,
a hard-bitten old bachelor "in loathe of female situations", would understand
his reasons for pampering Ella. Her marriage to Victor Faircloth was his fault.
His fault that the letter he wrote to her fell into the wrong hands. Had she
gotten that letter, her years of misery would not have happened—but all she had
known back then was that he had made love to her ... took her virtue beneath
the moonlit oaks alongside Corrigans' Pool ... and then left town early the
next morning without a word. What else was she to think other than he had
callously used her and then jilted her? The cruelties of the man she then
married had all but killed the young woman he had fallen in love with. Four
long years later, on the day he and Ella finally wed, he had silently vowed to
do all within his power to heal her so completely that not one scar remained. An old misogynist like Hempstead
Grouse would never understand loving a woman that much.
For the most part, he had succeeded in his
efforts. Ella was healing, smiling, never more beautiful than now, her
blue-green eyes never brighter, never more able with a glance to set his heart
to jumping. He did not fool himself that the gladness in those eyes was as much
for Greenpoole's resurrection as for the newly rekindled love between them. He
was almost ashamed of his secret pleasure when another batch of sharecroppers
didn't work out as she planned or when it rained too much or not enough and her
cotton crops perished—glad, even when it was his money being plowed under,
every dollar of cattle revenue he provided swiftly gobbled up by that hopeless
dream of hers. Now, after last year's meager cotton harvest, Ella sought to
resurrect the tidal rice lands that her deceased father wisely abandoned ages
before the war started! The steaming rice swamps was "drudge work"—a man's
least desirable way of making a living, and Ella's workers were abandoning the
swamp in droves. Aside from backbreaking labor, there slithered beneath those
marshy acres of twisted undergrowth denizens of venom and sickness of a kind
the newly freed Negroes, now able to choose how they lived and died, were
little inclined to embrace. Ella's tempting offers of land, to be deeded those
who would work the rice marshes for five years, had no effect on their
decisions to leave. With not enough takers, Ella would have to give up on the
rice soon. Maybe when her few remaining sharecroppers followed their
predecessors into the cities, she would see the hopelessness of this damned
scheme to prosper from the soil again, like in
the old days. He had been unable to make her understand that politics,
taxes, and the punitive spirit of radicals in congress stood like an
impregnable barrier to Southern dreams of recovery.
There was something mighty sad about folks
who live so much in the past that they can't get their feet moving toward the
future. In that respect, Ella was a lot like his mother; Kate Garland was
stubborn, unrelenting in her efforts to hold on to the past. He wanted her to
sell her land along the Nueces River near Corpus
Christi, and move to his ranch seventy miles north,
but she said "never!" Staying on the land that his father had fought and bled
for, kept her wild Irish-Indian husband alive ... kept "the old days" alive in
her memory, which was all that was left of old Kiel Garland.
Gentry's jaw tightened. He'd once though he
was a man like his father—fierce in his beliefs ... unyielding in what he knew
was right. Maybe he should do what Kiel
did over thirty-five years ago when he set out to claim his bride. Gentry
half-smiled despite his foul mood. Since boyhood, he had heard the story dozens
of times from first one, and then the other, of his parents. He liked his
mother's account best. She spoke of their "takin' to one another" with the
lilting laughter of the strong-headed Irish girl she had been in the spring of
1835, when young Kiel rode silently into the Irish settlement of San Patricio
along the Nueces River and carried her away while her clueless parents
slumbered in the next room. But Kate had been a willing conspirator, full of
determination and knowing every minute what she wanted and who she wanted—a
woman whose heart, once set, never changed since the first day she and Kiel
laid eyes on each other in her father's general store. Was Ella's heart set? He
wasn't sure. He was certain of only one thing; he had a rival—Greenpoole
Plantation.
The red glow on Gentry's cheroot went out; he
relit it and flicked the match into the wind. He had been silent in light of
Ella's happiness at Greenpoole, relishing her laughter that had come so easy,
until problems with her sharecroppers began to worry her. At the beginning of
those troubles he should have tried to convince her that the prosperity she
wanted lied in his thousands of cattle and horses—not cotton!
He turned slowly and gazed all around him,
but instead of seeing Greenpoole's tree- lined acres and the beautiful old Savannah River rippling past between delicately
shimmering walls of vine-hung foliage, he saw a vast rolling plain spattered
with oak motts and knee-high prairie grass melting into infinite fields of
bluebonnets, sunflowers, Indian blankets, and buttercups. A herd of wild horses
thundered into his vision, and beyond them hundreds of long-horned cattle
stepped warily from a wide patch of Mesquite
brush to graze upon the peaceful open range.
Gentry sucked deeply on the cheroot, and then
spewed the smoke from between his tight lips as if he had tasted something
foul. Slowly and steadily there came into his black eyes a look more
reminiscent of the "old days" and the old Gentry Garland. He took another drag
from the cheroot then tossed it over the bluff's edge into the river. He'd wait
until this last crop was in, and then he would tell his wife to pack their
duds, because he was taking her and his son home
to Texas.
Chapter
Two
"What do you mean, Honor, 'when we've packed
up and gone from this place?'" Ella stared at her younger sister. Surely Honor
could not be serious! If so, the girl had no more sense now—married and the
mother of a three-year old daughter—than when she was a child-like, fifteen-year-old
girl giddy with desire to wed her irrepressible beau, Andy Kearney. Ella looked
at their grandmother, Beatrice Corrigan, expecting her to be as shocked as she
was at Honor's silly remark, but no sound came from the woman. Not even a
derisive hoot! Ella continued to eye the elderly woman whose
owl-like eyes—like the steely orbs of an aloof wizard—continued to gaze
elsewhere. Surely, she would say something upon hearing such twaddle. The
Beatrice Corrigan that Ella knew had an opinion or rejoinder for every
conversation within her hearing range, invited or not.
Finally, Ella gave up and leaned forward to
face her sister, determined to speak softly, knowing that if she let her
emotions escape, the colossal empty room would echo her words like stones
striking the walls of an iron well. "Honor, I want to know what you meant by
that ridiculous statement and I want to know right now."
Honor glanced fearfully at Ella and then at
their grandmother, who still ignored them both. Honor quickly shifted her
attentions to the small girl draped across her lap and began poking nervously
at the girl's blond curls. The child immediately slid into a sitting position
on the floor and scooted on her tiny rump until she was out of her mother's
reach. When Honor motioned for her to return, the child entangled her fingers
in her curls and stuck out her bottom lip. Honor giggled. "She thinks I'm gonna
comb her tangles out."
"Honor..." Ella persisted.
Honor again looked to their grandmother for
rescue, but Beatrice—as if observing everything from a set of eyes on the side of her head—stiffened her chin against her high lace collar, as if to say 'you got
yourself into this, young lady, now get yourself out of it.' Honor
sighed. "I just meant that maybe someday ... you know ... we might all just
move into Savannah with Grandmother, like she keeps telling us we ought'a do."
She hesitated, then blurted, "Grandmother says we'll never be able to turn this
place around ... 'cause God and those hateful politicians in Washington won't let us."
Ella stared at her for a long moment and then
settled back against the hard wooden chair, her eyes skimming over the bare
room, her mind's vision choosing to see only the beauty that prevailed in the grand old house before
the Yankees carted it away. "You and Andy may go whenever you wish. I don't
intend to abandon Greenpoole to the sharecroppers. How would the work get done
without Gentry and me encouraging them? Besides, I have Hannah and the others
to think about. Old Baker Ben says he will not leave home, nor will Cricket and
the twins." She paused to note that neither woman was looking at her now. "...
and since Meshach was unable to abide the North and has come home, I've made
him Greenpoole's overseer—the crops are bound to improve." She waited for her
two companions to agree. When neither spoke, she continued, "Meshach and the
others love Greenpoole just as I do and just as—"she glanced up from her sewing
and looked sternly at first one and then the other, just as the two of
you should love it, she wanted to say, but didn't—"just as Father and all
Corrigans before him loved it. They would have never left simply because things
have changed and life is a bit harder—not even if the devil himself moved in
upstairs."
"A bit harder, you say?" Beatrice finally
said, then gave out a derisive grunt. She took a sip of tea then balanced the
cup in her free palm, her sour expression deepening as she looked around the
room. "I know the tables are gone, either carted away by the Yankees or sold
for Greenpoole's upkeep, but have you not another chair on which to set our
repast?" Knowing the answer, she continued, "...you know good and well, Ella,
Hannah and the others you mentioned—except for old Bake Ben—would gladly follow
you to town or anywhere else. "Tis you who refuses to leave."
"That is the very truth," Honor chimed,
nodding in agreement, as she jerked her attention from her grandmother to Ella
and then back to Beatrice, apparently expecting the traditional fireworks
between her older sister and the domineering matriarch of the Corrigan family.
But Ella spoke softly.
"You have so many lovely old tables and other
treasures in your attic, Grandmother. Seems you would have sent them out here
to Greenpoole by now, knowing our need."
Beatrice sipped at her tea, her weathered cheeks
tightening with her smile as she gazed over the cup's rim. "You and your sister
may divide my property between you, dear girl, when I am dead and buried. Until
then, I shall keep my treasures where they are."
Honor leaned far out of her chair to deliver
a hurried pat to Beatrice's knee. "In that case, Grandmother, I hope those
lovely pieces of furniture stay where they are for a very long time—even if we
do need them terribly."
Beatrice glowered briefly at her, snorted,
and then switched her gaze to Ella. "Your husband tells me that Greenpoole's
taxes have increased and are due weeks before harvest ... a harvest that will
not be sufficient to pay them, just as last time."
Ella set her cup firmly in its saucer. "I'm
surprised Gentry spoke to you of that matter, Grandmother. I've never know him
to complain."
"He was not complaining, dear girl, and why
shouldn't he speak to me, his elder and his friend? Anyway, he is a cattleman,
not a planter—perhaps he sought wiser council than has been his privy of late."
She ignored Ella's sudden frown. "As a former planter and eternal realist, I
advised him to the best of my awareness and experience."
"May I ask what advice you gave him?"
"You may ask." She sipped her tea again
before delicately replacing the cup into its saucer, scarcely making a clink. "I
suggested he follow his heart ... as long as it did not bog him down in a
quagmire of malcontent."
Ella smiled. "Thank you, Grandmother, because
my husband does, indeed, follow his heart, and I am most fortunate in that his
heart is with me here at Greenpoole, where it will always remain. There is no "quagmire
of malcontent" here," she added, then chose to ignore that the two women
glanced brief at each other.
* * *
At dusk, Ella stood on her balcony and waited
for Gentry to come home. In the back of her mind was her grandmother's
insinuation. Had Gentry disclosed feelings to Beatrice that he had yet to
reveal to her? Oh, but he would never do that! If Gentry thought of moving them
into town, he would have said so by now. Besides, he knew they could not run
Greenpoole while living seven miles away in Savannah. Even with Meshach in charge, they'd
need to be here. Why, they'd wear themselves out traveling back and forth every
day, for Heaven's sake!
She turned her back to the red sun sinking
into the river, and pressed her knuckles to her lips, her mind racing. Gentry
is in Savannah
so often lately, and he has seemed restless at times. Some days his moodiness
made her so uncomfortable that she quickly forced her thoughts elsewhere ...
there were so many important matters to ponder that she did not have time
for...
Instantly, her concentration was on the new
tax notice in the drawer downstairs. She'd have to ask Gentry for more money.
Oh! How she wished Beatrice had not come to visit today! She frowned then
glanced sidelong at herself in the mirror, wincing at the plainness of her
dress ... the severity of the way she now wore her long hair in a tight bun on
the nape of her neck. She looked so plain ... almost angry. Did Gentry find her
unattractive? Subconsciously, she loosened the bun and let her thick blanket of
pale hair fall to her waist. Was he glum because she no longer went out of her
way to make herself pretty for him? But when did she have time to preen her
feathers when they both worked themselves to the point of exhaustion each day?
Or was he sullen because she neglected him, falling asleep as soon as her head
hit the pillow, sometimes so tired she pretended to be asleep, ignoring his
touch until he gave up and rolled away from her.
Without further thought, she jerked the cover
from her huge copper bathtub, lamenting only briefly over how Sherman's Yankees had taken the tub's
beautiful Rocco base. She emptied into the tub the four large buckets of water
that Hannah and the twins kept filled to their brims for her bath. After
rummaging through several drawers for a forgotten pouch of coveted bath salts,
she peeled away her sweat-soiled garments and sank gingerly into the cool spicy
water. Lathering her hair and body, she tried to remember the last time she had
added fragrance to her bath, but could not recall. Lying back, she slipped
beneath the water to swirl the soap from her hair, staying under for as long as
she could hold her breath.
Upright again, she lifted her hands from the
water and examined the odd pattern of chafed and sunburned skin atop her
fingers. The fingers of her gloves had worn out ages ago and she had trimmed
them back three quarters past the second knuckle, and now calluses covered the
exposed undersides of all ten of her finger. Even with the protection of
gloves, her palms looked scalded in places where blisters had busted and peeled
away. She stared at her dirt-rimmed nails then thrust her hands into the water
to soak. "Hard work never hurt anybody," she mumbled, repeating the axiom she
had heard for years. "Hard work and success go hand in hand," she added, then
wondered who had first voiced that bit of truth. Whoever had said it, she was
sure it was truer now than it had ever been and, with a little cooperation from
her doubtful family, Greenpoole's success would happen a lot sooner than later.
It was up to her to convince them, but ... first things first. She smiled. Tomorrow
she and Gentry would go to town and pay the taxes.
Still smiling, she towel-dried her hair,
patted her body dry, and, ignoring her nightgown hanging on a nearby hook, slid
between the linens to await her husband. She had neglected him too long.
* * *
Ella lay with her head resting cozily on
Gentry's shoulder. A whispery breeze from the open windows and French doors
toyed gently at the mosquito netting that hung from a tall mahogany frame
attached to the ceiling over the bed. The moon was full and unusually bright
... splashing a transparent blanket of sliver over the couple and setting aglow
Ella's pale, bare skin. Their breathing had slowed and, as usual after making
love, they settled snugly against each other. She stroked his forehead with the
softer back of her hand, and ran her fingers through his jet-black hair, her
lips brushing his cheek from time to time, as she chatted casually about the
unfairness of the Yankees in charge of everything now. Laughing lightly, she
repeated gossip Judith Ashville passed along about Cleta Harris' affair with a
married Yankee, "the affair having started long before she divorced her
husband—the low-brow drummer she had run away with during the war, thereby
disgracing her socialite family to no end!"
She laughed softly again, and then,
after a short pause, "I'd like to go into Savannah
tomorrow, Gentry ... just you and I. We can pay the new taxes they have so
unfairly leveled against us, and, if you like, we can dine at the Savannah
Hotel afterward. It will be fun to get away for a few hours, and then we'll
have a leisurely drive home in the moonlight. I hope the moon is like it is
tonight, don't you?" She continued to stroke his forehead, waiting for his
reply, but none came. Disappointed, she was about to conclude that he was fast
asleep and she would have to wait until morning to repeat herself, but then his
low laughter jarred her, and she sat upright, trying to see his face in the
shadows. Stunned, she watched him roll out of bed, pull on his trousers and
then busy himself with the buttons.
"Gentry...?"
"Do you know what they call a woman who sleeps
with a man for money, Ella?"
"I didn't!"
"You did. And I might as well tell you, we're
leaving for Texas soon as the next crop's in and we've settled up with the
sharecroppers—you and I, and our son." He finished buttoning his pants and took
his coat from the bedpost.
"But Gentry, we don't have time for a visit
to Texas!
There'll be the plowing to do and then the new planting and th-." Something
made her hush, as he strode to the door then turned to observe her for a long moment.
"Not a visit, Ella. We won't be coming back
to Georgia
... except maybe for a short holiday someday in the far off future."
"What? But I can't!"
"We've tried living your way, Ella. "
"What about Greenpoole? What about my home?!"
"It's immaterial to me what you do with this
place," he waved his hand, indicating their surroundings and beyond "You can
sell it, give it away, or burn it down—which I wish to God Sherman had done and
saved us both a lot of headaches."
Ella jumped from the bed, pulling the sheet
around her, her eyes ablaze and brimming, not knowing whether to scream her
rage or sob her despair. Before she could do either, he stepped silently from
the room and closed the door; the finality of it stunning her anew.
