Tennessee. 1868. Hope

Rain came that fall and outstayed its welcome. The creek gargled its swell and gushed into the river. The river roared out of its peaceful bed and charged away downstream, dragging all it could grasp with it. The chickens became restless in their hovelled enclosure.

Sinclair fiddled. It wasn’t his instrument. Like most other things, the former owners, the Dupuis', had provided the fiddle and some other instruments as ‘aides to peace’ on the plantation. It was old and scuffed but it sounded good enough and Sinclair’s father Daniel had passed it on to his son along with the skills for its use.

The ‘Parson’ (who wasn’t really) whittled. Daisy mended and sang, her sweet voice filling Sinclair’s heart and the shanty’s air. Ella Williams replied to her in harmony from Langston’s shack. Charles and Parnell worked on some project to improve the plow harness. Lyle took George Williams out on the hunt while George’s sister Sarah and many of the other children pestered Langston for reading lessons, or simply just to read to them. They loved the bible and a book of children’s adventures passed on from the now grown Dupuis children. They were less enamored of a very old and far outdated Georgia State Legislature Inventory. How it got to a cotton plantation in South Tennessee not even the white people could fathom.

On a day much like all the other days of that fall Sinclair was roused from a reverie watching Langston’s boy George learn how to work the feathers for new arrows Lyle was fashioning. Above the din of inundation on the roof he thought he might have heard a cry. He looked at George and Lyle. George was absorbed with his fletching, but Lyle’s forehead was crinkled, and he’d paused in his work over the fire. They froze. A clear scream; a curdling male scream, came from the other end of the row of shacks.

Throwing themselves outside they joined up with Robertson, Parnell, Langston and most of the others and slathered through the mud and torrent toward Felicia Farman, who stood by the tree next to her hut with her hands clutched up to her face and her eyes like the gateway to hell itself. She could only point, her throat constricted and unable to produce more than a horrified, gull-like noise. They followed her concentration just in time to see a slender arm raised up above a postured wave before being pulled under and crushed into the rampaging river at the mouth of the frothing creek.

On the small jetty that normally stood well above the creek but was now threatened by the flood stood Dufferin Farman. Sinclair and his people watched in suspended horror as Dufferin seemed to hesitate. With a rippling spasm of fear, he hurled himself awkwardly into the terrible, swollen torrent. The arm had been his daughter Lamia’s, sent to the creek in faint hope of finding something on Dufferin’s fishing lines. Dufferin Farman couldn’t swim.

He disappeared beneath the raging surface so completely it immobilized all but Felicia, who began a near hysterical shivering and moaning. Ella Williams threw a blanket over her shoulder and tried to gently nudge Felicia inside the cabin, but the woman could only fall to her knees in the mud. Ella knelt beside her and prayed aloud. The rain stopped suddenly and all that could be heard was the mighty movement of water crashing down the creek and bolting into the hungry river.

Sinclair felt numb with the impotence of his weakness. They all did. Parnell leaned his long body against his own shack and sat down on his side bench, only dejection for company. Parson Jeb Parsons came huffing along with his two daughters supporting him. “What is it? What’s happened?” he managed to wheeze. Tess Parsons was wide-eyed in shock.

Langston put his hand on Old Jeb’s chest, “Dufferin went in after his Lamia, Parson Jeb.” Tears welled up in Langston’s eyes. Sorrow filled sobs escaped his throat and his chin dropped to his chest. Sinclair began to organize a recovery party. The sky finally lightened.

Dufferin washed up at a landing on a plantation a few miles down-river. The much more buoyant Lamia, always the dancer, alighted two counties over and was found after a fevered three day search. They joined each other again and finally in the shady plot of land which had been given over to the tiny community when they were still slaves. Their dead could be well tended there.

The rain had finally relented, and the sun returned, but with an unexpected bitterness in tow. The wintry cold had no appeal, not even for Sinclair, and the people moved about the business of the plantation as if in a frozen dream. Felicia, with a toddler boy to raise and an old mother who needed help, busied herself as best she could but the quiet moments kept coming and she could be seen staring unblinkingly at the creek as if to boil it away to perdition with her mind. The Parson’s beautiful Tess was with Felicia unceasingly now to help her and to comfort her during the truly bad parts of her day.

The men took up whatever of Dufferin’s work needed attention; there would be no talk of letting Felicia fade from the community, oddly embryonic as it was after all these years together. In the spring Dufferin’s patch, his muleless nowhere-near-forty-acres, would flourish with its neighbor lands. Felicia would get all the help she could use in tending her part of the vegetable gardens. She would not go wanting for feed for her fowl. No one could fill the gaping empty space left by a dancing daughter and a conscientious husband however. Over the winter Felicia faltered and dwindled to a mere wraith. The stormy fall boasted a third victim and Tess, together with some help from her sister and Old Jeb, found herself at fourteen with a toddler to raise.

Yet that wasn’t the end to a strange and perturbed time when new won freedom should have been at the heart of all matters. Winter and spring teased each other mercilessly that year. The daffodils sprouted their yellow delight then frost crushed the life out of them. The ducks returned and left again in consternation. Winter seemed downhearted, yet spring appeared to be fatuous and unenterprising.

Not expecting ice on his stoop one morning Sinclair stepped outside to suddenly upend on the slippery step. Despite his athleticism he tumbled hard and landed awkwardly on his left arm. It took the better part of the day for Daisy to convince Sinclair that he needed attention and to ask Greta Smith to look at his swollen and throbbing arm. Recognizing signs of a broken ulna (though she didn’t know the bone’s Latin name) Greta and her apprentice daughter Mabel applied stabilizing splints and prescribed some pain-killing herbs along with rest to the most restless of the tiny community’s men, one last ironic insult to the only one of them who had claimed a separate peace with winter!

In April an unexpected reason for celebration presented itself. Tess Parsons accepted the marriage proposal of Earl Farman, brother of Dufferin and uncle to the toddler Milton. Earl’s surrender of his long-prized bachelorhood surprised the community, but such a happy solution to the Farman troubles augured some relief from the tragedy of the past months. As a married man Earl’s allotment would be increased and his possession of his late brother’s tract was solidified. The baby would again have a father and Tess would gain a doting and very thankful husband. The source for Earl’s shocking courage in proposing to the beautiful, fawn-like Tess was unknown to all but Langston.

The reading man had seen the solution and begun his work in the darkness of that January. From a simple mention of one to the other to positive affirmations of the qualities which each began to recognize in the other, the regard of Earl for Tess and Tess for Earl developed from recognition to respect to admiration. Langston was deeply pleased with himself.

As Parson Jeb wished to give away his daughter in the European tradition by walking her down the aisle, the most pious man among them; Charles, despite his weak oratory skills, was convinced to conduct the brief, simple ceremony. After much cajoling the quiet, serious man relented. Both Sinclair and Langston; the other likely officials, felt that they were too close to the bride to give the matter the sanctity it required. And so, on April 28 Tess and Earl said their vows before their witnesses, then, with Milton suspended between them, they jumped over Felicia’s old broom. The toddler laughed.