From This Day Forward Page 4

  She stepped aside to let him pass into the parlor, and she followed him inside. “That wasn’t no trick at all, Massa Adam. Most times you was up to no good. I just took to givin’ you a lickin’ once a day just in case.”

  Adam didn’t let her see his smile as he walked to the mahogany sideboard that had been carried to Texas from his mother’s home in Georgia almost three decades ago. It smelled of the lemon oil which Sudie had used to polish it. He pulled open one of the doors and brought out a bottle and a glass.

  He glanced up in time to see Sudie’s quick frown. “Your leg aching you?”

  “Some,” he said, pouring an inch of the amber liquid into the glass.

  “Want me to rub it for you?”

  Sudie’s hands were magic on those occasions when, out of patience with his limitations, he rebelliously pushed his body farther than he knew was best and suffered the consequences.

  “No, thanks,” he said, carrying his glass over to one of the wingbacked chairs that flanked the fieldstone fireplace and sank down into it. He stretched his leg out carefully in front of him, absently rubbing the spot where the minie ball had pierced his flesh so long ago. He managed a smile for Sudie. “It’s not bad.”

  He took a swallow of the liquor, savoring its warmth on his tongue and the way it slid down to his stomach and settled there. In a few minutes, it would seep to his leg, and the pain would be gone.

  As he waited, he glanced around the familiar room, aware of its luxury in a way he had never been until he had seen Lori McClintock’s cabin. The ornately carved furniture, the luxurious carpet, the heavy draperies with their lace panels. For no reason that he could perceive, the image of her small, bare feet resting on that dirt floor came to him, and he marveled at how so much beauty existed amid such ugliness. And how ironic that amid so much beauty here had grown such ugliness. For an instant, he could almost see Eric’s smirking face.

  Sudie’s voice shattered the image. “I hope you didn’t give those people nothin’,” she said.

  He looked up, a little startled to find she was still there. “I’m sure it’s none of your business, Sudie,” he said. He was, after all, the master here.

  But while Sudie might be a slave, she had still changed his diapers, and she enjoyed a certain freedom with him. “You already do too much for those people.”

  “That is,” he recalled bitterly, “exactly what Miss McClintock said.” He could actually see Lori’s face, the way it had looked when she’d said it, too. The memory stirred up emotions he didn’t want to feel. He took another swallow of whiskey.

  “They be dead long time ago, it wasn’t for you,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard. “What for that woman come here anyways? What she need you don’t already do for them?” Adam looked at her in some surprise. Apparently she hadn’t listened at the door, and here, at least, was one secret she did not know. He intended to keep it that way. Knowing how she felt about Eric... Well, no one needed to know Lori carried Eric’s child, least of all Sudie. Not yet, anyway.

  “Mrs. McClintock wanted my advice on something,” he hedged.

  “You couldn’t give it to her here, in your own house?” Sudie scoffed. “Had to go down there, to that place where they live? I know what it like. My Oscar, he tell me.”

  Oscar was the man Sudie had taken as her husband after Adam’s father’s death. Sudie had loved Oscar for as long as Adam could remember, but Chet Ross had never allowed her to take a husband. Adam didn’t like to think about why he had denied her. “The McClintock’s house is no worse than the cabins in the quarters,” he said.

  Sudie sniffed in disgust. “The cabins in the quarters is clean and the roofs don’t leak.”

  “The McClintock’s cabin was perfectly clean, and we’ve got men here to fix the roofs. They don’t.”

  “Massa Adam, you don’t fool me,” she said earnestly, taking a step toward him. He noticed absently that she still held his hat in one hand and the dust rag in the other. In her distress, she was crumpling the brim of his hat. “I know what they got at that cabin that we don’t got here.”

  Automatically, Adam pictured Lori’s face again, but he ruthlessly banished the thought before Sudie could read it.

  Too late. “That girl is trouble, Massa Adam. You mark my words. She trash, and that kind only think about how they can take away something you got.”

  Adam couldn’t help but smile at this new irony. How wrong Sudie was. Adam had offered Lori everything he had to give, and she had still refused him. Dear God, even a penniless girl pregnant with a bastard child wasn’t desperate enough to accept a cripple.

  All the way back from her house, he’d steeled himself against the truth, not allowing the thought to form in his head, but he could no longer deny it. The pain of it lodged sharply in his chest, as if he’d swallowed a shard of glass, and he swallowed the last of the whiskey in an attempt to dull it.

  He held out the empty glass. “I’d like a little more, please,” he said, but Sudie merely gave the empty glass a disgusted glance and made no move to take it.

  “White trash like that, she do anything,” Sudie said urgently. “I know you’s lonely, Massa Adam, but don’t get caught in that trap! Your mama alive, she tell you the same thing. A few minutes a pleasure and a whole life a misery.”

  At the moment, Adam would have settled for the few minutes of pleasure, since it didn’t appear he was going to get anything else. He only wished Sudie did have something to worry about. He decided to change the subject. “Did you ever give Eric that advice?” he asked, knowing full well it hadn’t done any good if she had.

  At the mention of Eric’s name, Sudie’s expression instantly softened. And saddened. “I tell him ever since he old enough to put on long pants, but it don’t do no good. Least he sow his oats down in the quarters, though. The girls there is willin’ enough, and ain’t no colored girl gonna show up here wantin’ to marry him. You can’t blame him none, Massa Adam. You know he can’t help the way he is. He really a good boy at heart. He just kinda wild. An’ he want some fun in his life. Heaven knows, he ain’t seen much ah that. But he settle down when he find a good woman. You see.” Adam doubted he’d ever see anything of the kind since Eric had already found—and bedded—a good woman and hadn’t settled a bit. Thinking of Eric, he absently rubbed his leg again, even though the whiskey—or perhaps just the stretching—had already banished the ache.

  “Your leg achin’?” Sudie asked solicitously.

  Adam smiled patiently. “I did ask for a refill,” he reminded her, waggling the empty glass.

  Her expression radiated disapproval, but she put his hat and the dust rag down on the delicately carved table that his mother had called a “pie crust” table and came over to take his glass. “This stuff ain’t no good,” she told him, not for the first time or even for the hundredth.

  “I’m not my father, Sudie,” he reminded her gently.

  At the mention of the man who had once ruled this house, Sudie’s dark brown eyes narrowed and her expression hardened with remembered hatred. “No, sir, you ain’t,” she agreed. “Wasn’t the whiskey made Massa Chet mean, but it sure did make him worse.”

  How many times had Sudie risked his father’s wrath to hide Eric behind her skirts? But then, how many times had Adam done the same thing, pleading with Chet to spare the boy yet another beating for some small slight, sometimes only imagined. They’d both protected Eric, and look what good it had done.

  Sudie’s work roughened fingers brushed his as she took the glass from him, and for an instant he pictured the way he’d seen those same fingers stroking Eric’s dark curls as she comforted him time and again. While she’d loved Adam dearly, she’d enjoyed a special bond with Eric. For years Adam had assumed this was because she had been Eric’s wet nurse. Then he had grown older and learned more of life and realized that Sudie could not have nursed Eric unless she’d had a baby herself. That was when his disjointed memories of the night of Eric’s birth had finally made sense.<
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  Just six years old, he’d been confused when his mother took to her bed early one wintery evening, moaning in pain. The weather outside had turned bad as a Blue Norther blew through, drenching the world with an icy rain that froze solid on everything it touched. His father and the slaves had spent that night trying to save the livestock by getting all the animals to shelter and caring for those that were half-frozen when they were found.

  Meanwhile, Adam’s mother had given birth. Adam could still remember peeking into her room, even though he had been forbidden to do so, and seeing her on her bed, knees raised and hands clutching at the headboard as she strained against some unspeakable agony. Sudie had stood over her, sponging her forehead and urging her on. Only Sudie had been sweating, too. Adam remembered because the night had been so bitterly cold. How could Sudie have been hot? Then he’d seen her bend nearly double with an agony of her own, and Adam’s terrified young mind had somehow grasped the knowledge that whatever horror had taken his mother had also taken Sudie. The two women he loved most in the world were both dying before his eyes, and he stood helpless.

  Then Sudie had straightened from her convulsion and noticed Adam. She’d screamed at him to get out of there, and been more terrified of her anger, he had fled to the safety if his own bed where he had spent the night in desperate prayer. He’d promised God many things in exchange for the two women’s lives, and in the end, only one of those prayers ad been answered.

  Sudie handed him the glass she had refilled. Adam looked at the level with critical eyes. “Kind of stingy, weren’t you?”

  “I’ll rub your leg if it hurts more’n that,” she replied tartly.

  As he sipped the whiskey, he watched her face. She looked so serene, no one would ever imagine the horrors she had endured. He remembered that night again. Hearing a baby cry, but only one. When his father had come back near dawn the next morning, he’d been exuberant, rousing Adam to tell him he had a baby brother. Adam had been jealous. He was his father’s son, and he knew how important that was. Chet had told him often enough, and Adam didn’t think he wanted is father to have another son, one with whom he would have to share that distinction.

  And he remembered the whispered conversations and the small bundle smuggled out of the house. Sudie’s baby, born dead. Then his mother was so sick for days and days until she died, too. And there they were, the motherless boy and the childless mother. No wonder Sudie had loved Eric so much.

  “You expect we get a letter from Massa Eric soon?” she asked hopefully.

  “I don’t expect we’ll ever get a letter from him, Sudie,’ Adam replied frankly. “You should know him better than that.”

  Sudie looked away, her fingers plucking blindly at her apron while her eyes brightened suspiciously. “I reckon we can’t blame him. He don’t got as much reason to love this place as you do.”

  Indeed, he had none at all. Chet Ross had never forgiven his younger son for taking the life of his beloved wife. And Eric had paid a penance so high for that imagined sin that it seemed to have cost him his soul.

  When Adam thought of Lori McClintock and her baby he was sure it had.

  Without realizing it, he had drained his glass again, and now he stared into the bottom of it and willed himself not to feel the pain of her rejection. The one time in his life when he’d had the opportunity to finally right a wrong. To cure an injustice. To, by God, save someone from needless suffering as he’d never been able to save Eric. And she’d turned him down flat—pretended it was for his own good and sent him packing.

  Just who in the hell did she think she was? he wondered in sudden fury. Sudie was right. She was poor white trash of the worst kind. Didn’t even worry about what people would say about her bearing a fatherless child. Indeed, she preferred the shame of that to having a cripple touch her and—

  “Hello, the house!”

  His head came up at the shout that could only have come from one person. He was out of his chair as fast as his leg would allow, and he rushed into the hall with unseemly—and clumsy—haste.

  Bessie McClintock stood on the porch just outside the door, peering in. She looked just as she had this morning only more disreputable because she’d apparently been working in the fields in the meantime. Her stout body smelled of fresh sweat, and she was panting slightly, as if she’d run all the way from her farm.

  “Mrs. McClintock,” he said by way of greeting. “How nice to see you again so soon.” Although he tried not to, he found himself looking past her, out into the yard in a desperate effort to find Lori. She didn’t seem to be anywhere in sight, though, and instantly he remembered her implied threat to do away with herself and her child. “Lori?” he asked in alarm. “Is she...?”

  “She’s fine, or at least she will be, thanks to you,” Bessie assured him. Only then did Adam notice she was smiling; she seemed to be missing several of her teeth. “I come to tell you she changed her mind. She’ll be mighty honored to marry you after all.”

  Adam gaped at her, not quite able to believe his senses. If Lori had indeed changed her mind, she hadn’t wasted any time about it. What could have prompted her sudden change of heart?

  “Oh, and she said to tell you thanks,” Bessie added uncertainly, as if aware that Adam expected her to say something else but wasn’t sure exactly what.

  Adam found his tongue at last. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear it, Mrs. McClintock. Please, come inside so we can make the arrangements.”

  He turned back toward the parlor and only when he saw her in the doorway did he remember Sudie. She was staring at him with eyes full of horror and one hand covering her mouth as if to hold back a cry.

  “Sudie,” he tried, but she shook her head in silent protest.

  Nothing he could say would make this right in her eyes. Nothing except the truth, and perhaps not even that. In any case, he would never find out for sure, because he wasn’t going to tell her the truth. “Sudie, will you please excuse us?” he asked as gently as he could. “Mrs. McClintock and I have some business to discuss.”

  She made a sound that might have been a smothered sob and then she fled, running down the hall and out the other door as if the hounds of hell were after her. The urge to go after her and comfort her was nearly overwhelming, and Adam had to remind himself he had no comfort to offer. He was going to marry Lori McClintock, no matter how much Sudie might disapprove, and she would have to learn to accept that. “Your girl don’t seem none too pleased by the idea of you getting hitched,” Bessie observed with some disapproval o her own.

  Adam gave her his best smile and indicated with a wave of his hand that she should proceed him into the parlor. “Fortunately, my opinion is the only one that matters, Mrs. McClintock. Is Lori all right?” he added, remembering his initial fears.

  “Right as rain,” Bessie assured him, plopping herself down into one of the wingback chairs without waiting for an invitation. “Oh, you mean why didn’t she come herself,” she realized after a moment. “Well, now, you can’t exactly expect a girl to come running after you, can you? How would that look? But she’s willing, make no mistake about that, Mr. Ross. And she’ll be a good wife to you. A year from now you’ll be the one who thinks he got done the favor.”

  That, Adam had to admit as he lowered himself into the other chair, was what he was counting on.

  ***

  “I can’t go through with this, Bessie,” Lori insisted as she paced around the cabin in her shift. Her wedding clothes purchased with Adam Ross’s money, lay across the table, untouched. “How can I do this to him?”

  “How can you do what to him?” Bessie asked impatiently is she struggled into her good dress in preparation for the wedding. “Love him? Make him happy? Give him a family? Just which of those things do you think’ll be such a curse hat you got to spare him?”

  Lori blinked at the tears that tried to form in her eyes. Lately, it seemed she was always on the verge of weeping, unless of course she was already weeping. She wonder
ed if that had something to do with her condition or with the sorry state of her conscience. How could what she was doing be right? How could she put her own well-being so far ahead of everything else? “I can’t be so selfish!” she insisted.

  “What’s selfish ’bout wanting to give your baby a name?” Jessie inquired brutally. “You think this is all for you? Talk about selfish! Think about that baby in your belly for once.”

  “I haven’t been thinking about anything else for weeks!” Lori reminded her angrily as she swiped impatiently at the tear that had started down her cheek.

  “I mean think about it like it was a person. Like it was a person you loved.”

  Lori shuddered at the thought and wrapped her arms round herself as if she could somehow protect herself from… Love? How could she ever feel anything but loathing for this thing inside of her?

  “Maybe you can’t feel it yet, but after you’ve carried that baby inside of you for nine months, it’s gonna be a part of you,” Bessie said as she buttoned the bodice of her dress. “Then it’s gonna be a cute, helpless little thing that you’ll hold in your arms, and let me tell you, ain’t nothin’ easier than a baby to love. I know you, Lori, and there ain’t no way that soft heart of yours can hold out for long against your own baby. An’ it is your baby, too, no matter how much you might hate its father. You want that baby growin’ up here with nothin’, like you did, with other kids makin’ fun because he only has rags to wear, only worse because he don’t got no father, neither? And how’ll you explain to him that he could’ve been a Ross except you was too proud to take what Adam Ross offered you?”

  The pain of Bessie’s words had nearly doubled Lori over so that the tears she shed fell straight to the floor where they made small dark spots on the packed earth.

  “There now, don’t cry,” Bessie said, coming over and helping Lori over to one of the benches. “You’ll make your eyes all red for the wedding.”

  Bessie’s hands were rough, not smooth the way she remembered her mother’s hands being, but they were just as gentle as they brushed the hair away from Lori’s face. Bessie might not be her real mother, but she had been a good friend through long, difficult years. She could, she realized as she looked up into Bessie’s homely face, even forgive her for going to Adam Ross behind her back. Or at least she could but for one thing.