Chapter Nine
The Christmas season had arrived in Plantation Alley. The vast fields of the plantation estates sprawling along both sides of the farm-to-market road lay at rest. The cotton had been picked, the sugarcane cut, and the period on the calendar that Eunice Wyndham most dreaded was over. She welcomed the first prolonged spell of cold weather, but it meant that hog-killing time was upon them, when the pigs rounded up from the woods in early fall, penned, and fattened on generous feedings of corn and mash, would be killed and butchered. For the last several weeks, Plantation Alley had been a virtual slaughterhouse. Eunice had closed windows and doors, sacrificing the first bracing air of autumn to spare herself, Jessica, and the women servants the grisly sounds and smells associated with the killings. If the wind was right, the frantic squeals of “stuck” pigs and thick, strong odor of fresh blood, as well as smoke from pit fires burning in the curing houses, could carry all the way to Willow Grove.
Don’t come for Christmas until the last ham is in the curing house, Eunice wrote to her sister in Boston. You won’t be able to breathe the air without retching.
Those with more appreciation for the end result had learned to ignore the bloody business of sticking and killing and gutting, for it meant an abundance of meat for dining tables, larders, and smokehouses, not only for planters and their families, but, if their masters were generous, for the slaves as well. Carson Wyndham was the most munificent among them.
He kept for the Big House the kidneys, valued for their lard; bladders to be used as preserving sacks; pigs’ feet for pickling; and the heads from which to make headcheese, but the meat not set aside to be cured for his own use he had distributed to his workers. During the butchering, the slave community of Willowshire enjoyed quantities of fresh sausages, pork butts and shoulders, backbones, ribs, tenderloins, slabs of bacon, and a share of the makings for cracklings—bits of fat taken from beneath pig skin to be fried and baked in buttermilk cornbread—and chitlings, pieces of small intestines cut up and fried as a treat.
Once hog-killing season was over, work eased, and master and slave alike could relax a bit and enjoy the fruits of their labor. At Willowshire, there were many. It had been a season of plenty. Profits from his numerous plantations and business enterprises allowed Carson Wyndham to budget a present of twenty dollars to be given Christmas morning to the head of each Negro household in addition to sacks of candy, popcorn balls, and whittled toys for the children. Pantries and root cellars were full. A mild fall had produced a bumper crop of vegetables, berries, and fruits. Cotton sacks brimmed with pecans thrashed from the most productive trees in years, and no family—planter’s or worker’s—wanted for sorghum syrup to pour over their cornbread.
Which was why when the alarm went up that somebody had stolen into the master’s smokehouse and robbed it of two hams, Carson Wyndham called in his head overseer.
“I want you to find out who did this,” Carson ordered, his face the color of his reddish hair. Of all the sins the master of Willowshire could not forgive, stealing was at the top of the list. “It may be a runaway or an itinerant passing by, a vagrant, but if the thief is one of ours…”
“What am I to do then, sir?”
“You know the penalty for stealing, Wilson. Enforce it.”
Willie May had been listening while pouring the master his morning tea and she missed the rim of the cup, sloshing tea into the saucer. The door to the outbuilding where he received his overseers and dispensed his orders was propped open, and the fresh, holiday smell of the evergreen wreath tacked upon it was strong. Tippy had bound the cedar cutting with a limber wisteria vine and decorated it with painted wooden fruits and a big red bow. Passing it to enter the building, Willie May had felt a lift of her Christmas spirits. Now they drooped.
“What’s the matter with you this morning, Willie May?” Carson asked, but not unkindly. Lately, he’d taken an undue tone with her because of Tippy. Displeased with the daughter, he could not be too friendly with the mother, but his posturing relaxed when he forgot himself and had his mind on other matters. Carson had come to rely on the good sense and wisdom of his housekeeper. She prevented his wife from going off half-cocked and kept the other servants in line without disrupting the order of his household. Other servants could bring him his tea in the morning, but he preferred Willie May, whose presence never jarred. “You’re not coming down with the ague, are you?” he asked.
Willie May blotted the spilled tea with a corner of her apron. “No, suh, Mister Carson. I just hit my funny bone.”
“Well, you keep yourself in good fettle, you hear? We can’t have you sick at Christmas when everybody else is having a good time.” He nodded to his overseer. “That’ll be all, Wilson. You know what to do.” When he had gone, Carson swiveled his chair around to address the main cog that kept his house running smoothly. The redness in his face had eased. “What do you think, Willie May? Who’s stealing from us?”
“I couldn’t say, suh. I didn’t know anybody was. I haven’t heard a thing.”
There were hot rolls, too, and Willie May kept her attention on spreading butter and molasses on them, just like Carson Wyndham liked. She handed him a napkin, which he tucked into the collar of his crisp cotton shirt to catch the drips.
“Must be a vagrant,” he said absently, his gaze diverted to some reading material on his desk. “None of my people have reason to steal from me.”
“That is so, Mister Carson.”
“Wilson will find out who it is and may God have mercy on the culprit when he does.”
“Amen, Mister Carson.”
Willie May hoped the good Lord heard the invocation for mercy. She was the culprit. She had spotted the runaway, a boy not older than fifteen, stealing into the barn last week when she’d gone at midnight to check on Tippy, still quartered in the room next to Miss Jessica’s. Her daughter had been coughing all day, and Willie May had prepared a hot mustard plaster to place on her chest. It was a clear, moonlit night, and she’d noticed a shadow move out from the cotton fields, hesitate, move forward again, then pause. It emerged once more, and she had a brief glimpse of a skinny boy of her race wearing ragtag clothes, too skimpy for the cold night, before the body melted into the shadows of the barn.
No building at Willowshire except the master’s cabin—his outdoor study—was ever locked. The master’s arrogance wouldn’t have it. Nobody would dare steal from him. Barns, storage and equipment sheds, silos, root cellars, the two smokehouses, one for curing the most recent meat and the other for storing last year’s—all were open for anyone to enter without the bother of keys, but none would be so brazen without proper reason to do so. Carson Wyndham’s total control over his fiefdom guaranteed that.
So even her brief glimpse of the intruder convinced Willie May the boy was not one of Willowshire’s one hundred slaves. A cold feeling stole over her. A runaway, then.
She hurried down the stairs and let herself out the back door, grabbing a shawl from a kitchen hook, and quietly but quickly made her way across the compound to the barn. Slowly, she opened the door. It creaked a warning but not soon enough for the boy to overcome his frightened curiosity and duck his head down. He had found himself a bed of straw in the loft, and when he saw that he’d been caught, he stared back at Willie May like a hare caught in the sight of a hunter’s gun until she motioned for him to come down. The boy obeyed, his head hung, his shoulders drawn as if already feeling the lash of the whip.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said, wondering why she felt no fear. The boy was thin but taller than she and obviously desperate. Her only concern was that someone in the Big House was up and had seen them. “I’m not here to hurt you. Who are you?”
“I…can’t say, missus,” he said.
“I’m guessing I know why. You’ve run away, haven’t you?”
The boy remained silent, and Willie May, seeing in him her own son who had died of tuberculosis at fifteen, felt moved by a maternal impulse to put her arms around him. His shoulders felt knife thin, and his tense, stiff body was shivering in his inadequate clothes, either from fear or because he had not had time to warm himself, probably both. She pulled away and stared into his gaunt, frightened face. Without thinking of her own welfare, she took off her shawl, wrapped him in it, and said resolutely, “I’m going to help you. You must trust me.”
Either he would or he wouldn’t. Willie May could tell he was trying to make up his mind, but he looked hungry, and hunger took risks. “You can watch me go to the smokehouse, so you know I’m not going to get the master,” she said. “I’ll bring you some food. You’ll have to take it to your hiding place while it’s dark to eat it. It’s too dangerous for you to stay here. I’ll leave you more food and something warm to wear behind the smokehouse tomorrow at dusk, and you can come and fetch the stuff when all is quiet. I’ll hide everything under the firewood.”
She had snitched a ham and brought it to the boy, who had watched her from a crack in the barn. She exchanged her shawl for a horse blanket she found on a tack shelf and instructed him to leave it in the place where she’d hide the food. Before leaving him, she thought of a code by which they could communicate. Thank goodness it was Christmastime and the holiday napkins were out.
“When you see the corner of a white napkin tucked into the woodpile, you’ll know the coast is clear to come to the woodpile. If you see a red one, you’ll know to stay away,” Willie May told him. “The napkins will be easy to see from a distance. If you see a green one, that means they’re looking for you and you’re to try to make it to the gazebo where you can hide. Do you know what a gazebo is?”
The boy slowly shook his head, his forehead knotted in an effort to understand.
“It’s that white, round-looking structure to the side of the master’s house. You can see it from the woods. Most of the sides are open, but there’s a shed right next to it for storing extra chairs with plenty of room for you to hide. The gazebo is never used, and no one will think to look for you in a place so close to the house. I’ll come to you soon as I can.”
The boy had listened in silence, but his round, anxious eyes told her he’d taken in everything she’d said. Willie May wondered if his mama was still alive and worried out of her mind about him. After sunset the next day, she had left the items as promised, finding them gone when she returned with more food the following afternoon. For two days after that, though, she’d had to leave a red napkin in the chinks of the wood bin, and in that time after darkness fell, the boy must have stolen the second ham.
She had heard no news of a runaway or that anyone was looking for him. Willie May guessed the boy had no particular destination in mind when he took off. He’d run blindly on hope and luck, and his strength and courage had petered out somewhere behind the Big House of Willowshire. But now the overseers would be looking, and if they found the boy…
Why, oh why, had she sent Lulu—with a heart the size of a penny and an eye that could spot an overlooked spec of dust on a ten-foot windowsill—to fetch a package of jowls from the smokehouse when she should have gone herself? Willie May had been smart enough not to steal items from the pantry. If the discovery was made, Miss Eunice would suspect a house servant, and that would never do. Willie May had not believed two hams, out of the dozens remaining in the smokehouse from last year, would be missed. She had not counted on Lulu’s eagle eye detecting the theft or her nasty delight in tattling on the trespasses of others.
Willie May gazed at the head of her master bent over his paperwork. “What will you do to…the culprit if he’s found?” she asked hesitantly.
“If he’s a vagrant, he’ll be given a good thrashing. He can come to the back door and beg, but he can’t steal from honest folks’ smokehouses. If he’s a runaway, he’ll be taken back to his master, where he’ll get whatever punishment is meted out for the offense. Most likely he’ll be whipped. That’s the penalty for one of ours caught stealing.”
“Suppose…the culprit was simply hungry, and his stomach won out over his conscience?” Willie May suggested.
Carson lifted his head from his reading and blinked at her as if the rapid shutting and opening of his eyes would help him understand a question he’d never been asked before. Willie May braced for a chastising, but he said, “Rules are rules, Willie May, and reluctant though I may be to punish a hungry man, if I relaxed the rules for one, I’d have to do it for the others, and people take advantage of Christian charity.”
“Yessuh,” Willie May said, wondering how he would know, but she’d see the runaway did not strain his “Christian charity.” She knew the person who might help her rescue him before his back felt the lash. She would first run to get a green napkin to stick in the woodpile, then she would go to Miss Jessica.