“Didn’t stop to look behind me till I cross that state line. And then the Army, they don’t expect no papers from a black man. They likely a good number of men I barracks with who don’t go by the name their mama call em.”
“You look real nice.”
Alma was sweet when she wasn’t worried about her people watching over her, had those dimples at the sides of her mouth when she smiled and never scolded too much if a man needed a loan to tide him over. They’d been tight as twine before Wilmington got too hot for him to stay in.
“How bout you step into the carriage house with me, we get back where we left off?”
“Wicklow be out there.”
“They aint put him to pasture yet?”
“Besides, they gonna need me, with company and all—”
“We only here till they service the transport, Alma. Aint nobody staying over.”
Alma looks back into the house, calculating. “I was spose to be home by now.”
“Tell them your sister took sick.”
“Reesha moved on to Charlotte, got married.”
Alma’s sister has a wall-eye and sour disposition. Coop holds his tongue.
“I might could just ask if they need anything else—”
“We spose to get back to the station by ten o’clock,” says Coop, catching her eye and holding it. “I been thinking about you all the way from Montana.”
“That’s where you been?”
“Fort Missoula. Girl, they got some winter there — snow come right up under my arms.”
Coop is a medium-tall man, dark skinned, his arms thick from years of wrestling barrels up a gangway.
“I lay up in that cot with the wind screaming past,” he keeps on, “and who you think I’m missing? Who you think I wants to have there under that blanket?”
Some of them you can’t be too nice with, they get spoiled by the sugar and start acting wifey, but Alma is a regular gal. He has thought of her, it is true enough, thought of her nights in the stink of the turp camp, thought of her in the long tramp up north, thought of her in the barracks when the others are snoring and only him and the coyotes are still twitching. Thought bout Alma and Lavinia and Inez Brown and Maude Bledsoe who is married to that railroad man and the little one with the spaces between her teeth he took up with in Greensboro before they caught him coaxing somebody else’s mule out of somebody else’s barn. He’s always had a way with animals, which was why Tillis took him on in the first place. But that one knock-kneed, yellow-eye son of a bitch had the devil in him. Hind legs squatting down, dug in and staring at him, a look in his eye that say “Your time is up, nigger.”
After the little trial the owner say that mule so ornery he wish somebody would steal it. Then they give him more years than he ever expect to live and send him into the pines with an iron ball tween his legs.
“Train pull up in that station,” says Coop, leaning in tight, “I head straight for my Alma.”
She looks over his shoulder to the carriage house. “Light’s out now. Maybe Wicklow gone home.”
“I wait for you there, sweet girl.”
Alma touches his face with her hand. None of the ones who live outside the fort would ever do that, maybe not even if you paid them.
“I’ll look in on my people,” says Alma, “and get out there when I can.”
Miss Dolly St. Claire appears stage right in a spot, the light dimming on the minstrels behind her. Harry helped put the overhead lighting in here, devising a control box that can be operated from the back of the theater, and is gratified to see it put to use.
The soubrette strolls beneath a parasol in a ruffled lavender dress, a bowler-sporting dandy on her arm, singing in a coy, lilting voice—
Take it back, take it back, take it back, Jack
For gold can never buy me
“Maybe she’s a Silverite,” quips Niles, cocking his head to appraise her the way he does with new women. Niles is two years younger and has always been the brash one, the one who says what’s on his mind and leaps before he looks. A large sum of money went missing from the Judge’s safe the day he disappeared without a word, and it was two months before the letter arrived from San Francisco explaining how he was on the treasure quest and meant only to save the Judge the bother of sending him his monthly stipend for the next two years, taking it in advance.
Take it back, take it back, take it back
Promise you’ll be true
“I’d promise her anything to get to Heaven.” Niles fingers his moustache, cocks his head the other way. Harry thinks the prospecting trip was less a bid for fortune than the consequence of Niles’s sudden breaking of engagement with Mae Dupree and her father’s vow to “horsewhip the scoundrel.” Mae is married now, to a Lassiter, and all that has settled down.
Many of the audience join in on the chorus—
So take it back, take it back, take it back, Jack
Take back your gold!
It is the dandy’s turn then, a round-shouldered tenor in a light blue suit, wearing a red carnation in his lapel, neither young nor old. The voice that comes from him, though, is like a separate thing, like a beautiful soaring bird—
A little maiden climbed an old man’s knees
Begged for a story: “Do, Uncle, please.
Why are you single, why live alone?
Have you no babies, have you no home?”
Mae had been Harry’s first, at least in his heart. He had spent many a night extolling her virtues to his younger brother, asking his advice in matters of strategy, planning how to begin his campaign to win her heart. “It just happened,” Niles told him after the first time he’d seen them walking together at Lake Waccamaw. “Of course if you want me to back away, old boy, and give you a clear field—”
It was exactly what he wanted, but then he was cross with Mae for preferring Niles and pretended not to care and then miserably resigned himself to their engagement. And when he went to her house after his brother’s abandonment, hoping perhaps to make his own desires known, she had refused to see him.
That’s why I’m lonely, no home at all—
I broke her heart, pet — after the ball
He resolved to cold-shoulder his brother on his less than triumphant return, but Niles was deathly pale, coughing like a consumptive, his plucky grin so innocent of malice, his exaggerations so childlike, that they were immediately fast friends again. If Harry envies anything it is not his brother’s looks or that he was born with normal legs or even his dalliance with Mae Dupree, but the sheer adventure Niles has experienced at so young an age, traveling up north and out west and to the frozen Yukon while Harry has barely been out of the state. That, he hopes, is about to change.
Harry joins in the chorus with half the audience—
After the ball is over, after the break of morn
After the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone
Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all
Many the hopes that have vanished — after the ball!
A pair of Hibernians in green checked suits enter now, the orchestra playing The Irish Washerwoman as Pat hauls Mike out in a wheelbarrow, both wearing baldpates and flaming red muttonchops. Pat stumbles and dumps Mike in a heap at center stage.
“Ye clumsy Oirish fool, ye’ve broken me neck!”
“And how can ye tell, Mike?”