An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [2]
"I'd offer you something hot," I said, "but the stove isn't started. Ella May's gone. Left yesterday. It's only me and Mama now."
He nodded. "What will you do?"
"Take care of Mama. There isn't much else to do."
"How is she?"
"Not good, Johnny."
He nodded and looked at his hat in his hands. "I recollect when my daddy died."
"So do I." I'd been there. In their villa in Surrattsville when his daddy was laid out in the parlor, surrounded by white candles, white roses, dimness, and Johnny crying.
"I wish I could stay and be with you," he said.
"You haven't spoken to me in three weeks."
He looked abashed. "I've been busy, Emily."
Doing what? I wanted to ask. Only I didn't. These days you didn't ask what a person was doing. People weren't what they had been before the war. They did strange things to survive. For a while Johnny had a job with the Confederate mail service, running letters and God knows what-all else South, skulking through Union picket lines, crisscrossing creeks, reaching Pope's Creek, Maryland, in six hours, crossing the Potomac, then on to Port Royal on the Rappahannock River, then crossing that river with only eighteen miles to an open road to Richmond.
But he was doing something else now. His new job took him North. To Canada. To New York. He'd brought me back a darling pair of gloves from New York. They had eighteen buttons on each cuff. Better than Myra Mott at school had. And you had to go pretty far to best Myra Mott. Johnny got the gloves in a Fifth Avenue shop. He'd seen John Wilkes Booth and his famous brothers in Julius Caesar at the Winter Garden.
"I'm going away, Emily. I came to tell you."
"You're always going away."
"I may not be back for a long while. The war's ending. You know that. The Confederacy is dying."
I didn't care about the Confederacy dying. The Confederacy never should have been born, as far as I was concerned. My daddy died fighting it. The Confederacy had ruined everything. But Johnny believed in it. So I didn't argue the point.
"Dying," he said again. "You can hear the death rattle. Petersburg has fallen. Richmond is being evacuated. People are going crazy out on the street. Don't go out if you can help it."
"Richmond? My aunt Susie lives in Richmond."
"I know. I delivered all those letters to her, remember?"
"Mama wants me to go and live with Aunt Susie after she dies."
"That's why I'm here. To tell you you'll have to make other plans."
"What other plans? There's nobody else, except Uncle Valentine. And Mama and he don't get on, you know that. She says he's crazy."
"Everybody is crazy these days."
"She says he does things I wouldn't want to know about."
"So does everybody else. So do I."
"Do you, Johnny?" I peered into his handsome face earnestly. I was fourteen. He was twenty. But I'd loved him for years, ever since he used to take me into the store, away from all those jawing planters on the porch, and give me peppermint candy. He taught me to swim, too, in the creek back home. I was like a little sister to him, no more. I knew that. It wasn't enough, no. But beggars can't be choosers, Daddy always told me.
"Dr. Mudd holds your uncle in high esteem," he said.
"Dr. Mudd?"
"You remember. From Charles County. I told you how Booth wants to buy a farm from him down in Maryland."
Booth again. I looked at Johnny. He was wearing a new suit of clothes. Gray. Good cloth. I know cloth—before she took sick, Mama had worked for Elizabeth Keckley, Mrs. Lincoln's personal seamstress. Was he getting things from Booth, then?
"I'm here to tell you that my mother says you can come and board with her when your mother dies," he said.
I looked up quickly. "At your house?"
"Well, I won't be there anymore. But you can have my room. Mama would be