Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War

  Jack’s forehead shone with perspiration. “Master, I been asked to talk to you.”

  “Take a chair, Jack. We needn’t stand on ceremony today.”

  Jack perched on the rim of his seat and he set his hat on the floor beside him. He said, “Master Samuel, Midge won’t have it.”

  “Jesse is willing?”

  “Jesse ’bout as willing as he can get. He crazy ’bout that gal since first time he see’d her when we all plantin’ oats this spring. I could see that day how it was with Jesse. Midge say she don’t want Jesse.”

  “Jesse is a man of constant affections. He will treat her kindly.”

  “She say . . . she say he too black!” Jack’s work-thickened hands kneaded his thighs.

  Samuel Gatewood’s friend Uther dismissed every distinction between the races. But every so often one of Samuel’s servants demonstrated to Samuel Gatewood’s entire satisfaction that the white and black races had been engendered on different planets. “Jack . . .”

  “Oh, I know, Master, I know. I know you tryin’ to help her. I know you get Master Botkin to sell Jesse to Stratford so Midge could take herself a husband and not get into no more trouble. Midge know all that too, but she . . . she . . .”

  “Go on.” Samuel readjusted his neck scarf.

  “She say she won’t lie with him. She say Jesse too black.”

  Samuel opened a drawer for his razors and laid them neatly on his washstand. He hummed a few bars of “Camptown Races.” “I am certain Midge will do a wife’s duty,” Samuel said. “Sometimes I am at a loss to know how to treat you people. You are my family and precious to me, but sometimes . . .” He shook his head. “When I first discovered my son’s unfortunate dalliance with this servant girl, I was angry. I sent Duncan to the Military Institute hoping they would instill the self-discipline he lacks. After six months and creditable soldiering at John Brown’s execution, I believed I could trust Duncan home with us for our Christmas celebrations. I so looked forward . . .” Samuel paused for a moment and spoke more harshly. “The consequences of my son’s Christmas festivities are apparent in Midge’s swelling belly. So. Again I exiled my only son, because of a colored servant girl whose sole distinction is the inappropriate mimicry of her betters. It is not amusing when a colored house servant’s mocking speech is indistinguishable from speech employed by the first families of Virginia. If that is a joke at all, it is a joke in the poorest taste.”

  Jack hung his head.

  “Jack, most Virginians would have resolved this difficulty by selling the girl south—a solution, I believe, that would be more approved than the one I have elected. Instead, at some inconvenience, I have provided Midge a fine husband of her own race, a good man who adores her. Jesse will take her as she is, sullied, bearing another’s child. Jack, if Midge will not lie with Jesse, she will sleep tomorrow night in the slave pen behind the Wayne Tavern in Staunton where at auction I will sell her to Silas Omohundru or any other speculator who can meet my price. On my honor, I swear it.”

  After Jack left, Samuel shaved. When he nicked his chin, he stanched the flow with a liberal application of alum. Now that Midge was to be a respectable married woman, she would need a new name. They would name her Maggie.

  HALFWAY HOME

  NEAR WEST AUGUSTA ON THE

  PARKERSBURG PIKE, VIRGINIA

  OCTOBER 10, 1860

  THE FINEST STRETCH of the journey home was a mile past West Augusta where the turnpike surmounted a rise below Cross’s plantation and the blazing panoply of fall leaves came into full view. Mrs. Sallie (Botkin) Kirkpatrick clucked the horse on. Alexander would be so enchanted.

  When Alexander laid his Harper’s Weekly aside, Sallie longed to converse but held her tongue. Her husband’s pleasure would be enhanced by woman’s silence when the sublime prospect presented itself.

  Though low on the horizon, the sun was still strong enough to transmogrify the maples and oaks, whose scarlets and golds pronounced the death of one season and the dormancy to come. Sallie, whose life had changed as dramatically as those trees, was in a philosophical humor meditating on the end of her prior life and the small new life within her.

  Oh why won’t the horse hurry!

  At fifteen years of age, Sallie Botkin Kirkpatrick was delighted with her discovery that life could be beautiful and simple. Married women, when they said, “Child, you’ll understand better when you’ve a husband of your own”—how wise they were—how much they understood!

  The vista was Sallie’s happy secret. In a few moments her Alexander would be delighted and (she dared to hope) awed by her beautiful mountains. She so wanted him to love her home. Grumpy dear Opal and her sweet father: how she wanted those she loved to love one another!

  She wouldn’t contemplate Uther’s reaction to the news of her expulsion from the Female Seminary and that Sallie’s new husband had been invited to seek other employment. From an early age, Sallie had been able to steer her thoughts toward agreeable prospects, and now she exercised this useful faculty. She was the daughter of one educated man and wife to another. How elevating it would be when the two men met.

  Sallie, who ordinarily had a rather good opinion of herself, had of late been chastened. Mrs. Kirkpatrick wondered what value was one’s own head when one could marry a man with a greater one and all the knowledge of Rome, Caesar, Cicero—even Catullus (Sallie blushed)—stuffed into it? It was one of Sally’s charms, Alexander had told her: how readily she blushed.

  Her Alexander had graduated—with the highest honors—from Yale College and afterward taken a position with a great banking firm in New York City. There Alexander met Dr. Timberlake when the Seminary’s president traveled to that city to discuss school finances. How sorry Alexander’s firm must have been to lose him (how fortunate for Mrs. Alexander Kirkpatrick!). Alexander was far too fine for commerce.

  Until Alexander, Sallie had thought her womanhood an encumbrance: something that kept her from doing those interesting things boys did as right. As a child her nearest female model had been Auntie Opal, who’d rather foal a mare than keep house. Two summers ago, Sallie awoke with her thighs drenched in blood and ran to Aunt Opal. “It’s nothing terrible, child. Pin a rag in your underthings. No different from cows coming into season.”

  The thought horrified her. “Am I going to be like that, ‘bulling’ after every man who comes near?”

  “Honey, I pass blood like you’re doin’ and never let no bull near me. Some girls like that foolishness, some girls don’t. Get back to the house and tear yourself some rags.”

  From Opal, Sallie had learned how to pull lambs and calves, how to treat foot evil in sheep and nosebot in cows. This evening, thus, it was Sallie’s second nature to spare the old mare which had been all Alexander could afford.

  At last they arrived at the vista Sallie had been anticipating, and it was grand indeed. Feminine ridges comforted her, brilliant colors enlightened her: truly, God had been gracious to this part of the world. The ugliness of the past week, the angry angry men—all behind them. Safe in the bosom of these mountains, she and Alexander would rear their baby and not care a jot for the world’s opinion. Sallie’s eyes welled with tears. “Look,” was all she said.

  “What?”

  Alexander had been dreaming.

  “The mountains,” she breathed. “Their colors.”

  “I was remembering,” he said, “that damned Olden. Such effrontery: I ‘betrayed his trust’! I trifled with the affections of ‘a scholarship student of superior faculties but inferior background.’ You know perfectly well it was you who came to my rooms that night. To return my Catullus, you said.

  “But . . . !” Alexander could be so unjust! The first time Sallie read Catullus, how her virginal ears had burned.

  “You may be one who’ll find this amusing,” Alexander had said when he gave her the poems, though he must have known simply possessing that book would endanger his position at the school.

  Amusing? Hardly. By candlelight,
in her room, the beginning scholar had translated the ancient poet of Eros. She guessed at some of the Latin. Those words were not to be found in any dictionary belonging to the Augusta Female Seminary.

  Catullus’s poems made Sallie’s life seem flat and uneventful. Six months before, the scholarship girl from the mountains had thought Augusta Female Seminary a cathedral of the intellect. Now it seemed shabby and provincial, a school to instill nice manners in stupid country girls.

  Sallie Botkin had allowed Alexander Kirkpatrick to make love to her because she thought he was her new life.

  The poor old horse trudged along. The sun dropped behind the mountains, outlining the ridgeline trees like bristles. “Do you have such colors in yankeeland?” she asked.

  “I believe so. I am recalling a disagreeable exchange I had earlier with Trustee Olden—this was at one of Dr. Timberlake’s insufferable garden parties. Olden was trying to impress me, quoting Cicero’s ‘Aegroto, dum anima est, spes est’ as ‘While there is spirit, there is hope’—mistranslating anima, thus making a medical opinion a religious one. Of course, I corrected him. . . . “Olden asked me, ‘Don’t you think your previous employer . . . generous, sir, to set our poor needs before his own?’ The overbearing fool! Sally, Trustee Olden took my modest correction as an excuse to berate me. Even then I had fallen from Olden’s favor. Even then he looked upon me with a cold eye. . . .”

  In the distance, Sallie saw the lights of Halfway House, whose owner claimed it was the finest inn this side of Parkersburg. Though the old mare was awfully tired, Sallie urged it to pick up the pace.

  Alexander droned on, “When your . . . difficulty . . . became known, Trustee Olden thought marriage an unsatisfactory remedy. ‘Marriage would reward this scoundrel.’ He spoke thus in my presence! What reason had Olden for hating me so?”

  “There’s Enoch Cross, Alexander.” Timidly, Sallie waved to the figure outside the inn. Suppose Staunton gossip had traveled faster than they had? “Mr. Cross’s establishment is well regarded in the mountains.”

  On the flat across the road were cattle pens where drovers held their charges overnight, and even in this cool weather, the smell was pungent.

  “Oh, hello, Sallie Botkin. Hello. We’re a little rough tonight—all men, all drovers. But they’re a good lot—don’t go mistaking the heart for the manners.”

  “Not Sallie Botkin any longer, Mr. Cross. As of yesterday forenoon, I am Mrs. Alexander Kirkpatrick, and the handsome fellow here beside me is my husband. He is a professor of Latin. We go to bide with my father for a spell.”

  The bald plump innkeeper took her arm and afterward stuck out his hand to Alexander. “Glad to make your acquaintance, sir. I am Enoch Cross, and my family owns the valley you entered when you put Deerfield behind. So you have plucked the fairest of our mountain flowers. You are a happy man, sir.” The innkeeper pumped Alexander’s hand. “I don’t believe there is a perter girl west of the Blue Ridge. I have known Miss Sallie since she was a babe in arms, making the Staunton journey with her father and his nigger, Jesse.” To Sallie: “A child is born of Jesse’s wife, Maggie, that girl they used to call Midge. The baby is said to be whiter than her mother, and she is whiter than some immigrants coming into Richmond.” Cross rubbed his hands briskly. “But we’ll gossip later. I’ll have the boy unload your luggage and care for your horse. Do come in, do come in. Last night we had a prodigious frost—did you feel it in Staunton?”

  “I didn’t take particular note,” Alexander said.

  “My husband is a scholar, Mr. Cross. Only we plantation folk are creatures of the weather. Some of your corn is not yet cut?”

  “Oh, we cut as we go. We cut as we go.”

  Halfway House was a large one-room log house improved by an addition in the rear and a second identical log house attached to the first. Oddly angled roofs ran hither and thither and gray cedar shakes made the roof appear mossy in the dusk.

  The original cabin served as the inn’s keeping room, and the wide-throated fireplace at the end of the room threw reddish light and welcoming heat over Sallie’s pale, weary face.

  While the travelers hung their wraps, the innkeeper related a tale about Aunt Opal. “In September it was, a drover came in this very room and warmed himself before this fire.” He indicated the fire in question as proof of his words. “After a time, he is describing a homestead, in the mountains, not far from SunRise.” Mr. Cross winked. “Hadn’t thought to waste my time at such a place,’ the drover says, ‘but I heard they had likely steers and I was looking for such.’ The drover continued never guessing I am familiar with that very homestead! ‘Mr. Uther Botkin did have some steers to sell, red polls, and they were the finest damn animals I seen this journey.’ Excuse my language, Miss Sallie, but those were his words. ‘Best damn steers I seen in five trips through the county. Would they make the drove to Baltimore? Oh, I’ll say they would. And would they bring top dollar in that city? I’ll say. But Mr. Uther Botkin who is selling them acts like he can’t tell the tail of a steer from the snout and I ask him how much they weigh and he says he don’t know so I ask how much does he want for them and he excuses himself to go inside his house, and when he comes out Botkin says, “They’re eight hundred pounds and I’ll have eight dollars seventy-five for each of them,” and he won’t come down on his price no matter how I dicker, not even when I pretend I’m so disgusted I’ll seek elsewhere and mount my horse as if I would. How in tarnation that man knows to a nickel what them cattle is worth without telling one from another I can’t tell you but I give him his price and they are down in your pens, right now, Mr. Cross, if you wishes to see ’em.’ And I say I don’t because I’ve seen Uther Botkin’s cattle before and though they are not numerous, they’re prime red polls, none better. I don’t tell him it’s Auntie Opal that’s reared them and priced them because I figure the joke’s on him. How is Auntie?”

  “My father writes Opal is in good health.” Sallie paused. “Our marriage is not yet known to him.”

  Mr. Cross eyed Alexander. “I see.”

  “But Father will be pleased, I just know it. Two educated men in one household. Mr. Cross, I anticipate so many learned conversations between them.” She took the innkeeper’s arm familiarly. “Dear Mr. Cross, I have not thanked you for your news about Jesse’s wife’s newborn. Jesse is almost a brother to me.”

  She turned to Alexander. “Dearest, Mr. Cross’s cook came to him from Philadelphia and is famous the length of the turnpike.”

  Cross said, “Here, Miss Sallie, you’re shivering. This won’t do. We’ll move these rough fellows back from the fire. You see they’ve made camp and blocked the heat from the rest of the room. Move aside there, boys. Can’t you see a lady is with us this evening, her and her husband? Here, I’ll pull this table to the fire and you shall sit, Miss Sallie, so the fire warms your back and you can look upon your husband instead of these rascally countenances. Now, Professor . . . Kirkpatrick, did you say it was?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t recall any Kirkpatricks in this county. There were Kilmartins down by Dayton. Two brothers. In the miller’s trade.”

  Alexander brushed the wood table as if it were littered with invisible debris. “I suppose the beef will be juicy?”

  “Yes, sir. Juicy as you like.”

  “Thank you. I prefer my meat juicy.”

  The drovers removed from the fireside were dressed in canvas pants, heavy shirts, and vests. Most wore short overcoats and none had removed his hat. Their talk was of cattle and markets and prices, and scraps of that conversation slipped though the crackle of the fire: “Knacker up by Broadway will take any beast can’t make the drive . . .”

  “Fifteen heifers and that damned Brown swore wasn’t none of ’em in calf . . .”

  “Philadelphia’s good but Baltimore’s better. They ship salt beef from Baltimore. Brothers, some of our good mountain beef travels all the way to the South Americans. I ’spect they don’t have beef cows of their own.”
br />   Sallie so enjoyed watching her husband eat; each neat cut of his knife, every fork motion brought her pleasure. Although she would have averted her eyes had he raised his, Alexander concentrated on his meal. It was one of the things she so admired about him: how he could lose himself. She admitted no doubts. Alexander would find a new position, and until that happy day, they would live on love. In her father’s house, they would travel the byways of history, politics, and poesy. Sallie smiled. Alexander would introduce ancient Rome to Mr. Jefferson’s most ardent disciple. What a convention of ideas!

  Seeing Mr. Cross’s inn through Alexander’s eyes reduced it somewhat in Sallie’s estimation. The drovers hadn’t washed too recently and they would spit their tobacco juice into the fire, punctuating conversation with explosive hisses. Dusty cobwebs swathed the rafters, and Sallie sensed a host of small red eyes in the dark gaps between the chinking. Mr. Cross’s Philadelphia cook had overdone the beef.

  Alexander pushed his plate away and in the same motion rose to his feet. “Come, my dear, didn’t you say we had to be away at dawn?”

  Their chamber was tucked away under the eaves where three of Halfway House’s eccentric roofs met. The room had a sloped ceiling here, a tucked-in corner there, and a window that was no more rectangular than it needed to be. Three beeswax candles cast a soft glow. The new Mrs. Kirkpatrick had never seen anything so delightful.

  Apple wood crackled on their fire and apples perfumed the air. The quilt on the high bed was cross-and-crown pattern and the bedposts were topped with pineapples carved from black walnut. It was cozy, the kind of room a child dreams about.

  “Oh, Alexander,” Sallie said, “I am so happy. I know you are not pleased matters . . . turned out a they did. You are a splendid teacher and I am certain Dr. Timberlake and Trustee Olden will altogether regret their decision to dismiss you. Where will they find another man of your accomplishments?”

  “As Cato said, my dear, ‘Wise men profit more by fools than fools by wise men, because the wise man avoids the faults of fools while the fool cannot emulate the wise man’s good example.’ ” Alexander beamed. “I am glad you are happy.” He sat on the corner of the bed and proffered his boot, and she clamped it between her knees and tugged. His stocking had a hole through which his toe protruded. How glad Sallie would be to mend it! She had never admired the matrimonial state and as recently as this spring had disparaged other girls’ efforts to attain connubial bliss. Hoops and crinolines had seemed more encumbrances for active limbs than honey traps for a gentleman’s glance. The conversation encouraged at the Female Seminary (where a girl’s every other sentence must lift the heavy burden of embellishing some man’s quite ordinary accomplishments) bored Sallie to distraction. She’d rather describe the wildcat Aunt Opal had trapped or dispute Mr. Gibbon’s opinions about the Emperor Hadrian. And here was Sallie positively yearning to mend a man’s sock! She giggled as she tugged at Alexander’s boot.