Within minutes the logistics had been worked out. Buck and Sarah would accompany Rex in the hearse, while Gus would go ahead with the others. Ruth and Miriam volunteered to cut up sheets for bandages. Gypsy and Scamp were tied to the rear of the carriage.
Inside the narrow glass-encased compartment, aware of the woman across from him, Buck ruminated as he crouched beside his patient. He’d sworn he’d never perform another amputation, and now he was about to cut off the lower half of his friend’s leg.
#
It amazed Sarah that the preparation took longer than the operation. Buck instructed her in meticulous detail on her duties as his anesthetist. After administering a generous dose of laudanum to make Rex sleepy, she’d placed a napkin over the tea strainer and held it an inch above his nose and mouth. At Buck’s direction she dripped chloroform slowly onto the cloth and watched Rex’s eyes. If his pupils started to dilate she was to slow the rate.
“Reverend,” Buck said, “I’m going to need you to hold his leg steady while I cut.”
“But you’re using chloroform.” Clearly the minister wasn’t eager to be part of the surgical team.
“He won’t feel anything, but his body doesn’t know that,” Buck explained. “He’ll jerk as if he did.”
Christian held Rex’s injured leg in a firm grip between the knee and the tourniquet below it. Sarah could see only some of what was going on. She was astounded how fast the amputation went. What disturbed her most was the sound of the bone saw and the sight of Buck lowering the severed foot to the floor. Within minutes he had sutured the skin flaps and dressed the wound.
“You can both ease up now,” he said, as he mopped his brow. “It’s all over.”
#
Buck finished washing his hands of Rex’s blood, stretched his spine and strolled out onto the porch of the vicarage. It was late afternoon now. There was barely enough time left for Gus and the ladies to reach Columbia before darkness overcame them. He’d already discussed sleeping arrangements with the minister. Buck would stay on the settee in the parlor with Rex, Sarah would sleep upstairs in the guestroom, and Jeffcoat’s men could sleep in the loft of the barn. They would set off for Columbia in the morning, provided Rex got through the night without complications.
Miriam was sitting in one of the porch rockers when Buck stepped outside.
“How is he?”
“Everything went well. Medically. How he recovers from what happened—”
“Is up to him,” she said, finishing his thought. “You did what you had to do and saved his life.”
“His life was never in real danger.”
“Because you were here. The Lord Provides, blessed be His name.”
Buck sagged into the other rocker. Exhausted.
“Gus is getting things ready, then we’ll be leaving,” Miriam said after a minute of silence. “Before we go, may I ask you a question?”
He nodded.
“Why did you want that horseshoe?”
“I’m not sure exactly,” he answered honestly. “It’s been there as long as I can remember, but every once in a while I’d catch Emma staring at it, and she’d get a funny expression on her face, as if it held some secret, special meaning for her.”
“Did you ever ask her about it?”
“Once, when I was a kid. She just smiled and said the horse it belonged to was going to carry her to bliss. I must have been pretty young, because I remember asking her where bliss was, on the other side of Columbia? She’d howled with laughter until I thought she was going to cry, then reminded me to always hang a horseshoe with the ends pointing up, otherwise all the good luck would fall out.”
Miriam smiled. “Even the unlucky need luck.”
Buck gazed over at her, at the melancholy expression in her brown eyes. “Is there more to this than it being just a common good-luck charm?”
She bowed her head, then continued. “We got to be friends in the weeks after she came to live with us. She and I had something in common, a long heritage as a people striving against oppression. She knew her days were numbered. Awareness didn’t make her sad. On the contrary, it allowed her to unburden herself about things she hadn’t shared with anyone in decades. I was happy to listen.”
Like the rabbi had been happy to listen to Asa pour out his soul. There was something special and cathartic, Buck was beginning to realize, in letting people ramble on about what was inside them.
“What did she tell you?”
Miriam grew pensive for a long moment as she peered into space, then she went on.
“His name was Marcellus Deeds. He was a free black from somewhere down around Savannah, came through here selling small musical instruments, reed pipes, flutes, castanets, that sort of thing. Also hand-carved figurines and other doo-dads. Made them all himself. Apparently he was quite talented with a knife.
“Emma was young then, maybe sixteen or seventeen—she wasn’t sure—but not more than twenty. She’d come to Jasmine with your momma, as her personal servant. Then Marcellus showed up on his buckboard. He was visiting all the local plantations, selling his wares to owners and overseers, anybody with money, mostly for their children. Penny flutes were a favorite.
“He and Emma hit it off on first sight. I reckon she was a fetching lass as a teenager. She figured Marcellus was maybe ten years older, in his mid-twenties—he probably didn’t know himself—and to hear her tell it, he was as bright and handsome as they came, quick-witted and smooth-talking with all the charm and self-confidence of a plantation owner’s son.”
Buck thought of Clay who fit that description perfectly.
“Marcellus hung around here longer than was profitable—he’d sold all anybody was going to buy—and he had to move on, but not before he’d proposed to Emma. They had two problems though. First, she was a slave owned by Mildred, and your momma wasn’t about to emancipate her. Second, Marcellus didn’t have the kind of money it would take to buy her freedom, ten-thousand dollars at least, when he was earning less than a hundred dollars cash a year. And that was assuming your poppa would even countenance selling her.”
“Especially to a black man,” Buck pointed out harshly. “Father had very definite ideas about people staying in their place and what they had a right to.”
“Nevertheless Marcellus swore he’d find a way to raise the money, that he’d come back, buy her freedom, they’d get married and go off, maybe out west, to raise a family of their own. He didn’t have a ring to give her, so before he left, he presented her with a baby Jesus he’d carved out of hickory as his token of their engagement.”
Buck stared at Miriam. “My God!” he exclaimed. “You’re not talking about the one Momma used in our Christmas crèche every year? Surely not that one.”
Miriam paused, then nodded. “When your momma discovered it among Emma’s things, she accused her of stealing it. Emma swore he’d given it to her and explained why. Mildred only half believed her is the way Emma explained it to me, so for safekeeping, to make sure nobody stole it from her, your momma took it and promised to return it to Emma when Marcellus came back for her.”
“I can’t believe Momma would—” Buck shook his head. “Did he?” But he already knew the answer.
“Emma never saw or heard from him again.”
Buck hung his head. “What happened to him?”
Miriam gave a fatalistic little shrug. “When Emma told me about Marcellus Deeds last month, I put out inquiries to see if any of my sources or their contacts had information about him, but it’s been forty years since he disappeared. Maybe he’d lied to her and never intended to come back. Maybe he died of a fever, had an accident, or was killed for some real or imagined offense. Free blacks have always lived precarious lives. Maybe he was a runaway slave posing as a freed man and got caught. There’s no telling. He might even have found someone else. Personally, I like to think he was sincere and something beyond his control prevented him from keeping his promise.”