Free The Rebel Wife by Taylor M. Polites

bombazine and barege fill the room, along with flurrying ribbons of crape and velvet and great veils pinned against black bonnets. They are like so many crows picking their way under the trees. Black-gloved hands reach out for me, resting on my arms and head. Soft black kid falls on my cheeks and against my hair. They lift my veil from my face as the door closes behind me.
    “Poor dear,” they murmur, and “Poor darling.” “Come sit.” “How are you, dear?” and “It’s been too long, Gus.” They speak in soft whispers of consolation. Jennie Heyney puts her arm through mine and walks me into the room. They surround me. We are all in black and time has stopped. The dark shadows of the shuttered music room and the blackness of the cloth hide whatever might be threadbare between us. They pet and coo at me like a foundling child. And all I can think is that Eli left no money. How can it be?
    “Gus, what a beautiful veil.”
    “Gus, what a lovely dress.”
    “Augusta, you look so young. Why, you could be sixteen.”
    “Gus, with those eyes, you won’t wait long.”
    “Great blazes, let her sit, won’t you? Bring her here to me.” The women part like the Red Sea to reveal Alabama Buchanan. She sits perched on the edge of a high-backed side chair and pats a gloved hand on the seat next to her. “Here, Gus. Come and sit.”
    How many years since Bama spoke to me so familiarly? And that name. Her overenthusiastic father was a delegate from Albion to the state convention in 1819, when she was born. The Buchanans have always been an important family in Albion, but childless Bama lost Colonel Buchanan at Gettysburg and never remarried. She recovered his body—some unwitting Yankee farmer plowed him up, and a note was found pinned to his coat with his name and company written on it, legible after six years. The colonel is buried in the New Cemetery along with the other recovered sons. After all that, Bama found herself fairly destitute, like the rest of us. Like I may be again. At least she held on to her plantations. Virtually everyone around me, these ladies, is supported by the meager cotton crops that have been pulled by tenant farmers from what remains of their families’ lands. Cotton is not what it used to be.
    Bama grabs my hand, glove to glove, and pulls me onto the chair next to her. “It is hot, isn’t it?” she says. Her smile shows a gap on the side where the barber pulled three teeth. She squeezes my hand. “The fever will be coming up early from the river this year.” The room rustles with fabric and fans.
    “Mr. Branson didn’t die of the yellow fever, did he, Gus?” Sally Mabry asks.
    “No, Sally,” I answer. “It was a blood disorder.”
    “Oh, Gus,” she gushes suddenly. “It’s just so good to see you.” She behaves as if we were still at school in Huntsville. She rushes to me and hugs me impulsively. The women nod as if they agree.
    “That’s right, Gus,” Bama intones in her gruff voice. She grabs Sally’s arm and pushes her away without ceremony. “And rather than smother you with mourning, we want you to know that you are welcome back. Welcome home, Gus.”
    The pale, black-framed faces look down on me with sympathy, but they are reserved. That coldness, the bitterness of loss and deprivation, is in their eyes.
    “It came on so sudden, didn’t it?” Mattie Hearns shakes her yellow curls from the edges of her bonnet as she speaks, her blue eyes wide with excitement. “I mean his illness. I heard it happened so fast?”
    “It did,” I answer, looking around the room at their faces. “I—”
    Bama interrupts me. “Yes, and so it should be proper to bury him quickly. I quite think you are right to put an end to this sooner rather than dwell on it.”
    “Of course.”
    “Was it very gruesome?” Caroline Lensch speaks with her handkerchief to her mouth. “Was there a terrible lot of blood?”
    “Carrie, enough,” Bama interjects as I sit mute. “Let’s leave