Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

“I did knock, Miss Lucie,” Georgia said in her even, gentle voice. “When I heard no answer I came in. I was looking for you and Master Pierce to say that Joe has come ahead to tell that they’ll be here in just a few minutes. He says Master Tom isn’t hurt by wounds but he’s starved near to death.”

The tears brimmed her great eyes and hung on her lashes. These lashes, black and long, held the drops and she put up her hand and wiped them away.

“Starved?” Lucinda repeated.

“It’s that damned prison,” Pierce muttered. He turned to Georgia. “Tell Annie to have some warm milk ready. A half cup of milk with brandy will do him more good than anything. You can’t feed a starving man real food. God, I knew they were starving the Yankee prisoners — but my own brother!”

“It comes of his joining the North,” Lucinda said bitterly. “If he’d—”

“Never mind now, sweet,” Pierce interrupted her. “The war’s over.”

“I’ll hate the Yankees as long as I live,” she retorted.

Georgia went away. The moment which she had interrupted was gone and Pierce bent to kiss his wife quickly. “I’ll go along down myself, Luce, and see that everything’s ready. I wish I’d gone to meet him. But he sent word he was all right … Luce, who’s going to nurse him?”

“Bettina,” Lucinda replied. She sat down in her rose colored chair. The satin was grayed and Georgia had darned it carefully. “I couldn’t spare Georgia,” she went on, “but the boys are so big now I thought we could turn them over to Joe.”

“Good,” he said.

He hurried out of the room into the wide hall. At the door of the nursery he saw the two sisters, Georgia and Bettina, in whispering talk. They looked alike, both tall, both golden-skinned, dark-eyed, slender. But Bettina, the younger, showed the Indian blood in her black ancestry. Georgia did not. Georgia’s face was soft and oval, the cheeks smooth, the lips full. Bettina’s cheeks were flat, her nose sharper, her eyes keener, her hair less curly. Where the two girls had come from Pierce did not know, except that they had been part of Lucinda’s father’s estate, and when he died they were for sale. He had bought them because Lucinda wanted them. “Wonderful workers,” Lucinda had called them. He scarcely knew them, because a month after they had come into the house he had gone to war.

“Bettina!” he said abruptly. There was something so delicate, so sensitively aware of him in the faces the two women turned to him that he was disconcerted. He had seen this delicacy often enough in the faces of slaves, even wholly ignorant ones, a refinement of the human being so extreme that he was always made uncomfortable by it. It was the result of utter dependence, the wisdom of creatures who could only exist by pleasing their masters. But in these two women it was pathetic and shameful, because they were not ignorant. He must ask Lucinda why they were not ignorant.

“Did you want something, Master Pierce?” Bettina asked. Their voices were alike, deep and soft.

“You’re to take care of my brother.”

“Yes, Master Pierce,” Bettina said.

Pierce paused. “You two,” he said abruptly, “don’t call my brother and me masters. I lost the war — Tom won. I can’t be called master any more — Tom won’t want to be, if I know him.”

“What shall we call you, sir?” Bettina asked.

It was disconcerting that both of them spoke with a clear English accent, without a trace of the shambling dialect of slaves. It was suddenly monstrous that he had bought these women. But he had not heard them speak when he bought them. They had simply stood hand in hand, their heads downcast.

“You — you can just call me mister,” he said abruptly.

“Yes, sir,” they breathed. They looked at one another. He saw they would simply call him nothing, ending every sentence with “sir.”

He looked out of the window. A slow procession was winding along the road between the oaks — Tom! He ran down the stairs, threw open the front door, leaped the stone steps and lifted from the litter his brother. But could this be a human creature, this tall stick, this gangling monkey, this handful of bones, loose in a bag of skin?

“Tom!” he muttered strangling, “Tom, boy, you’re home!” Then he said sternly. “Look here, we’ll soon have you — you fed — well again—”

The dark skeleton face could not smile. The fleshless lips were drawn back from his teeth, fixed in a grin of agony. Tom’s voice came in a faint gasp:

“Home—”

Pierce carried his brother up the steps, and was horrified to feel the looseness with which Tom’s head upon the stem-like neck hung over his arm. His own people had done this — in a secessionist prison they had starved his brother! He had tried to reach through the walls of war to save Tom, but hatred had been stronger than love. Then he pushed aside anger and pain, in the way he had learned to do, to save his own being. Fifty thousand men had been starved to death in those prisons, but Tom was still one of the living. And the war was over.

“Everything is going to be all right, Tom,” he said gently.

He carried his brother through the great dim hall, up the stairs into the west bedroom. The room was full of late sunshine, and on the hearth a fire burned. Bettina stood at the bedside, holding the sheets ready, and Georgia moved the copper warming pan to and fro. Georgia was crying silently, but Bettina’s face was grave. She put out her arms and slipped them under Tom’s bony frame, and lowered his head gently to the pillows. Then she drew the covers over him.

“Where’s the brandy milk?” Pierce demanded.

“Here, sir,” she said.

A spirit lamp stood on the table, and she poured the milk from a small skillet into a blue flowered cup set in a saucer.

The ghastly lips drew back still further over Tom’s strong white teeth. “My cup—” he whispered.

“Annie told me it was, sir,” Bettina said softly. She took up a thin old silver spoon and began to feed the milk to him.

“Don’t — know you,” Tom whispered.

“Bettina,” Pierce said. “I got her — and Georgia — after you left home, Tom, I reckon. It was just before the war. Of course, they’re free now, working for wages.”

“Sir,” Bettina begged him, “it doesn’t matter.”

Across the hall Lucinda’s voice floated clearly. “Georgia, Georgia!”

“Don’t let her come in yet,” Pierce said.

“No, sir,” Georgia agreed. She wiped her eyes and hurried out of the room.

Bettina slipped to her knees. Tom was swallowing drop by drop, as she fed him. He looked up at his brother from bottomless eyes.

“I can’t — eat,” he whispered, and two small thick tears forced themselves from under his papery eyelids.

“You’ll be eating everything a month from now,” Pierce said.

“I thought I’d die,” Tom whispered. He longed to speak, but Pierce would not let him.

“Don’t think about it,” he urged. “Just rest, Tom — it’s all over.”

Drop by drop from the silver spoon Bettina fed him. Pierce gazing down at Tom’s face saw her slender hand holding the spoon steadily, putting the drops between the waiting lips until the cup was empty.

In the warm silence Tom’s eyes closed. Bettina looked up. “He’s falling asleep, sir,” she whispered. “’Tis the best thing.”

She rose and noiselessly drew the old red velvet curtain across the western windows. “I’ve tried to get a doctor from Charlottesville,” Pierce whispered back. “But there’s not one even there.”

“We’ll heal him ourselves, sir,” Bettina said.

“It’ll be mainly on you, Bettina,” Pierce said. “Neither I nor Miss Lucie know much about such things.”