Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [192]
Her heart surged.
“So beautiful!” she called back to him.
“Dolphins rising!” her husband said. “Come, we’ll follow them.”
“No, no, not to the ocean, no!”
He shook his head as if at a confused child.
“You are afraid, you, and I thought you, afraid? Never…”
“Turn back,” she said, reaching for his arm.
Reluctantly, he turned them around, and they sailed past rocky cliffs until again the city came into view.
“I am not afraid,” she said, “it is just…the tides…”
“My dear, I know the tides,” her husband said.
Still, she could not repress the dread. It became confirmed for her one Sunday about a year later when, off alone on his sailboat, tacking across the Bay through the ocean tides, a surge came up and dumped her husband and dear benefactor into the waters from which he did not emerge alive.
Several years went by after his death, and then Eliza remarried, this time to a journalist who wrote editorials for the daily newspaper. A rather rotund man with a black, dagger-like goatee who enjoyed dispensing jokey wisdom to anyone in his company, he seemed an odd choice for Eliza to have made. She stood several inches taller than him although they were a bit more equal in age than she and her first husband. And unlike the first, who enjoyed (to a fault, as it turned out) the pleasures of the Bay, this fellow enjoyed the train and the horse and wagon, and took my mother, and sometimes included me, on trips around the state, down to Los Angeles, and over to visit the redwoods and into the great woods to the east. I enjoyed his company, but what passed between us did not resonate as paternal.
Chapter Eighty-eight
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Eliza Stone (& Son) (cont.)
Meanwhile, at a great distance to the east, the drums of war beat for years and years—and a death on the battlefield, which my mother would never know about, touched my life, though I myself would not learn about it for years and years. Of course, she now and then read a news dispatch in one local newspaper or another. The Union marched into the South and battled the army of the slaveholders, which now and then gave back as good as it got, but eventually, as she saw it, got precisely what it deserved. Even at this distance she could imagine, if she let herself, blue-coated soldiers rampaging across the landscape of plantation and swamp. The violence of war made her feel somewhat uneasy, however justified this war might seem to her. She had put great distance, both physical and temporal, between herself and the South where she had spent her first two decades of life. But now and then, long after the war had ended, she circled back and down in her thoughts to those plantation days and the angry tortures, physical and mental, of her enslavement. Even as I grew older she constantly revisited in memory those to me quite ancient days and suffered again the agonies of a life without liberty.
“I am sorry to say I am not as free as I had hoped,” she told me once while we were out for a walk across the top of Russian Hill—I tried to see her as often as I could even when I was attending school on the other side of the bay, because by this time she had lost yet another husband—that editorial writer—in this case to the fault in his heart which gave out, oh, mix of love and death! while they were locked in a marital embrace—“not with the way my mind keeps going back to old days of torture and menace even in just the everyday life I tried to live. You are a free soul,” she reminded me as we looked out at blue-white sky and the white-tufted waters of the bay, “you are free to make your life or wreck it on the rocks. The country fought a war”—ah, that war, that murderous war!—“so you could be this way. Whatever you do you are free to do it. Choose wisely, good son, choose wisely.”
The next time she made almost the exact same speech to me we were sipping tea and looking out over the bay from her vantage point of our house on Macondray Lane, the house left to her by her dutiful and adoring late second husband, her newspaper