Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [3]
A few minutes later, the kitchen door opened and Big Eli trudged inside, carrying Tessie in his arms like a child. She no longer fought against him but lay limp in his arms, her hands covering her face. Rain soaked both of them, streaming from their curly hair and running down their faces like tears. Tessie sobbed as if her heart would break, and I saw that it wasn’t just rain that coursed down Eli’s face. He was crying, too.
“God knows all about it, Tessie,” he soothed as he sat her down in a chair near the fire. “God know how you suffering. They took His son away, too, remember? He know how it feel to lose His boy.”
Esther finally released me and hurried back to her cooking. She flipped over the ham slice with a smooth flick of the frying pan, then shoved the pan back into the fireplace. I was free to run to Tessie, but I didn’t. I backed away from her instead, overwhelmed by her despair. Rarely had her attention been focused on anything or anyone but me. Even when Grady was a baby, she would leave him crying in his basket to tend to me if I demanded it. For the first time in my life, Tessie seemed completely unaware of me, as unaware as my mother was during one of her spells.
“Shh, don’t cry,” Eli murmured. He lifted Esther’s shawl from the nail by the door and draped it around Tessie’s shoulders. “Don’t cry. . . .”
“No sir!” Esther suddenly shouted. She slammed the frying pan down on the table with a clang that made my skin prickle. “You let that girl cry,” she told her husband. “I know how she feel and so do you. Isn’t our son sold and gone, too? That pain don’t never leave a mother. Never! I feel it to this day.”
Tessie lifted her head to face Esther, her features twisted in anguish. “Your boy only over to Hilltop. You know where he at. My boy’s gone to auction and I ain’t never seeing him again!”
“Only for this lifetime, Tessie,” Eli soothed. “Then you be with Grady all eternity.”
Tessie wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands and pulled the shawl tightly around her shoulders to stop her shivering. Her gaze fell on me for the first time. She looked me straight in the eye, something she’d never done in my entire life. No servant dared to look a white person in the eye. Tessie’s eyes were cold with hatred.
“This here your mama’s doing,” she said, her voice hushed with rage. “Your mama behind this.”
“Tessie!” Eli said in horror. “Hush your mouth!”
I turned from them and fled, crying as I ran across the yard, into the house, and upstairs to my room.
I didn’t see Tessie again for the rest of the day. Luella came up with my breakfast tray a little while later and helped me get dressed and brush my hair. But Luella didn’t hum or sing like Tessie always did, and she brushed too hard, snagging my hair in the bristles and bringing tears to my eyes.
“Where’s Tessie?” I asked her as she made my bed. “Why did those men take Grady away?”
Luella shrugged her bony shoulders. “Don’t know, Missy. Don’t know nothing about all that.”
I sat alone in my room all morning, gazing through the windows, watching the rain gather in puddles in the street below. Our house on Church Hill stood on the corner of Grace and Twentysixth Streets, and from my bedroom in a rear corner I could look down on our backyard and the street. The gate stood open, swinging a little in the wind. I stared at the spot where the wagon had stood, willing it to return, willing the men to bring Grady home so our lives could all return to normal. But the carriages and wagons that splashed past our house never even slowed, much less stopped. Grady didn’t come back.
Around noon, my mother’s maidservant came to fetch me. “You mama asking for you,” Ruby said. “She’s wanting you to eat lunch with her today. In her room.”
It was the first time I’d seen Mother since her latest crying spell had begun, several weeks ago, and I had no