Chapter 10: Learning

1866

In the week before the wedding, after considering a room in Mrs. Hardesty's boarding house, Robert and Caroline fixed up make-shift living quarters in the front part of the storage space above the store, both saying repeatedly that it was only temporary. They smiled at each other a great deal.

The room had two small, casement-type eyebrow windows that looked out on the cobbled street and a low ceiling which sloped toward the back of the brick and frame building plus a very steep and quite narrow staircase that led down to the store below. Robert brought in his own bedstead and hair mattress in the family's wagon, and Caroline produced a cane-bottomed chair and a small chest of drawers. She hung a clouded mirror over the dresser, as she called it, and put a picture of Abraham Lincoln on the opposite wall, both on bare joists since the walls were unfinished, just lathe and plaster. She found a washstand in the attic of her home, and Robert purchased a plain, white basin and large pitcher along with a matching chamber pot at Kidwell's store. Annie gave them a small, blue vase to put flowers in, one of her special treasures. It had been a present from her great-aunt, the one that often smelled like celery for some reason.

When they awoke on their first morning as husband and wife, they lay on their backs, holding hands and looking at the cobwebbed rafters in the gray light of dawn. The bed was really not big enough for two to rest on without touching and her toes played with his as their hips rubbed.

"Sure was good food," Robert said, his other hand on his flat belly. "That Maudie is some cook."

"Didn't you like the wedding?" she asked, nuzzling her cheek against his bare shoulder, avoiding his prickly beard. "Annie was so dear."

"Um," he said, kissing her forehead.

"I was certainly surprised when I saw you had shaved your beard."

"Now I'll have to keep doing it." He touched his barely-stubbled cheek.

"Um hm," she said. "I like it."

"It's still early." He turned toward her, taking her in her arms.

Their bodies merged easily and gently as if from long practice rather than fresh discovery. They did not part until they heard the front door being rattled below them and someone calling, "Mister Bob, Mister Bob, you in there?" Both were surprised that the sun was so high.

Robert unwound himself from the tangled covers, stumbled to the window and called down, "Overslept, Zed. Be right down."

"Yassuh," said the blocky Snowden who had been invited to the wedding but chose not to attend since he suspected his black face might cause some problems for his boss even if he stayed out of sight in the church's balcony. He was well aware of the accepted norms of the society in which he lived, and he was not sure that young Mr. Williams was as sensitive to the niceties as he should have been. Just needs some growing, decided Zedediah Snowden, he's a good enough white man. Reckon his family never owned slaves. He'll soon learn.

Robert flung open the door, his hair all awry and his shirt unbuttoned, suspenders hanging by his lank thighs. "Sorry," he said.

"Thas' aw'right," Snowden said making a real effort not to smile. "Getting married's a trying business. I been married, off an' on, near twenty years. I knows."

"Twenty years?" Robert said, tucking in his shirt tail. "How long have you been free?"

"Since, lemme think now, since eighteen and forty-fi', no suh, January forty-six it was, long time now." He shook his head, seemingly surprised by that fact. "'Fore that I was in some, what they call broad marriages, but since I got my 'mission paper, since I been free, I'se only had two wifes. Fust one died of a fever, poor thing, rest in peace." He got his big push broom and set to his morning chores while Robert ran up the stairs and finished dressing, barely remembering to kiss his wife before he went down to work, tugging his galluses up on his shoulders and fumbling with the garters on his sleeves, his shoes laces flapping.

Caroline stood by the wash stand in her shift and smiled at his back, very pleased about being a married woman and no longer a maiden. I'll have to remind him to shave, she thought, touching the box that held the two razors Robert's mother had given him, English razors that had been his late father's. Childhood is done with, she thought and studied her reflection. Who is that woman, she grinned at herself, that old married woman with the tangled hair and not even a corset on her body?

It was later that same Monday that two well-dressed ladies, sisters, came into the store to purchase some seed for a winter garden; spinach, kale and other leafy greens mainly as well as a few ornamentals such as gourds. They had a list their husbands had given them and by the time they were ready to leave they had accumulated several lengths of shiny harness chain, a bag of annual rye grass seed, two bushels of processed oats, a large bag of general-use fertilizer and their packets of vegetable seeds, all piled on or in front of the counter. The older of the two asked if she could open an account, and Robert filled out a card for her. Then he said good day to both of them and called, "Mr. Snowden, will you help these ladies out with their things."

Zedediah Snowden came quickly from the back room, mouth set and head down. He hefted the fifty-pound bag of fertilizer just as the younger woman turned toward Robert, hands on hips.

"Put that down," she said to the big man with the sack on his shoulder. "Did I hear you right?" she asked Robert, snorting out her breath.

"Ma'am?" he said, thoroughly confused.

"Did you call this, this person here 'Mister Snowden'?" she demanded.

"Yes'm," said Robert, "that's his name, Snowden."

"We will take our trade elsewhere, where business people have proper manners," said the woman. "Come Mildred." She shook her head, made a noise deep in her throat and said, quite loudly, "I never!'

The older woman sniffed as if she smelled something foul, snatched the account card from Robert's fingers, tore it in half, tossed the pieces in the air and took her sister's arm. Both women left the store with their chins high and their faces scarlet, hard shoes clacking the boards.

"I done tole you," said Zed Snowden patiently. "I tole you and tole you. Cain't do that in Rockville."

"Damn," said Robert a bit louder than he meant to.

"Robert," said his new wife who was dusting shelves and affixing price tags on some recently-arrived merchandise. She came to his side, feather duster in hand. "What happened?"

"The Muellers, you know them I suppose, married to those brothers, pillars of the church," he said. "Deacons or something."

"What about them?" Caroline asked, looking from Zed to Robert as the big man began putting the seed and fertilizer back in stock, steadily shaking his grizzled head from side to side, obviously unhappy.

"I just lost their business."

Caroline waited, puzzled.

"I called Zed 'mister.'"

"You did?" said Caroline. "Well, we don't need their trade. Too bad." She went back to her dusting, back very straight. Robert watched her, surprised again, his anger still simmering. Somehow she knew he was watching and stood even straighter, occasionally stretching up to show him a bit of ankle.

Five days later, very early in the morning, a thump at the front door roused Caroline from her dream. She poked Robert who lay with his back to her, gently snoring.

"Eh, ow?" Robert managed as she poked again. "What?"

"A noise," Caroline said just as there was a second thump, a bit louder than the first, sounded like a snowball Caroline thought. Isn't that odd; can't be a snowball.

Robert yawned and rolled out of the narrow bed. "It's dark," he said, rubbing his eyes.

"So? Go see," Caroline demanded, holding the quilt to her chest.

Robert pulled on his britches and found his shirt, yanking it over his head, and hurried down the narrow staircase, suspenders flapping. He could barely make out the trees on the courthouse lawn in the faint pink light of pre-dawn. He walked to the front door carefully in the dark, cupped his hands about his eyes and looked up and down the empty street. Other than a rather mangy dog coming from a distant alley, nothing moved but a few leaves in the gutter and a couple of prospecting crows whose usual morning meeting had not yet been called to order on the courthouse lawn.

He sniffed. In a store full of seed and various types of fertilizer, it was hard to distinguish an odor, but Robert smelled dung and his nose said it was horse manure. He took the key from the nail in the lintel, unlocked the glass-paned front door and pulled it open. Gobs of fresh manure fell on his bare feet and the worn threshold. What appeared to be two shovelfuls of very ripe, straw-thickened horse manure had been thrown against the lower part of his door, coating it several inches thick and sagging toward the boards as he watched.