San Antone. V. J. Banis
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 at all, that she really did harbor no regrets at what had happen. If anything, she was close to feeling grateful, though not even to herself could she admit that. Clifford Montgomery had been a brute of a man; life with him could hardly have been pleasant, especially for one little more than a child when she married.
Joanna felt a pang at some of the unkind thoughts she had had of this woman. No wonder she’d been so glad for some company. And what loneliness of the spirit, what unhappiness, had that tiresome volubility masked?
At the same time, she found herself wondering: Suppose.... Suppose things had ended differently, that it was Lewis who had been killed, not Alice’s husband. That came very close to happening. Would she be feeling relieved, grateful, set free? Had she unconsciously wanted her husband killed that night? It was a cruel charge to bring against oneself, and in its wake left obligations, debts, duties that inevitably bound you all the more tightly to that other person. There were things you must make up for, things you wouldn’t want left weighed against you in the balance.
But then, what did one owe oneself? Something, surely.
Alice was speaking, her voice easy and light. She was not a woman given to introspection, Joanna knew; quite likely Alice had not paused to reflect upon her feelings. Joanna found herself hoping that never happened.
“If there’s anything you need...,” she said aloud. Alice had made some mention of money; the exact statement had slipped by her. “Anything we can do....”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Mr. Montgomery was a careful man when it came to money. And his business partner—his former business partner, that is to say; I still have trouble remembering—has made me a generous offer.”
She smiled and for the first time Joanna realized she must have been exceptionally lovely, that fourteen-year-old girl, virtually sold into slavery by her gambler father.
“You know,” Alice said, looking suddenly as pleased as if she’d managed it all herself, “I really never expected to be an independent woman.”
There was a problem with the second wagon. Intending to travel from Galveston to San Antonio in the comfort of a carriage, Lewis had arranged for only one driver, William, who had driven their carriage in South Carolina. The other slaves in Texas with them were maids and household servants. Stable and field hands had been sent on the overland trek.
William, gifted with a coach and four, balked at handling the cumbersome prairie wagon. “I don’t know nothing about no oxen,” he asserted. “It’s completely different.”
“I don’t see how you could know that without even trying,” Joanna argued, without real conviction since she herself didn’t know either.
“I just know,” he said with stubborn dignity, and would not be budged.
Lewis, of course, blamed her, and seemed to relish the difficulty—it was she, after all, who had insisted on a second wagon for the slaves.
“I say, let ’em walk, the way I planned to begin with,” was his solution.
Joanna brought the slaves together to ask if there were any among them with experience handling a team. There weren’t, and none either, it appeared, eager to learn. She coaxed and questioned, pleaded, and finally threatened to leave them all behind to fend for themselves in the unfamiliar city, a threat that