Southern Son Read online

  Henry Holliday’s word was law to his son, and he was careful to obey—though it wasn’t really his father’s strict discipline that kept John Henry on the straight and narrow path, but his mother’s gentle persuasions. Like cousin Mattie, his mother was always watching him, making sure that he was behaving himself as a gentleman, and John Henry didn’t like to disappoint her. He loved his mother as much as he idolized his father, and her good opinion of him mattered more than any tempting misbehavior—most of the time. There were days when his adventurous streak got the better of him and made him throw caution to the wind and commit some ungentlemanly act or other. Then Alice Jane would reprimand him and call him to repentance, her sweet voice tinged with the suffering of a loving parent: “John Henry, dearest, I am so very disappointed . . .” and John Henry would be truly ashamed of his sin and beg for her forgiveness, which of course she always gave.

  But Cousin Mattie wasn’t nearly as forgiving as his mother, and she was still fuming over the embarrassment of having all the family turn those chastising eyes upon her.

  “I don’t know why I even talk to you,” she whispered, “you’re such a child, John Henry, and a spoiled one, too! It’s a shame you don’t have any brothers or sisters. I bet that would teach you to be a little less selfish.”

  “I am not selfish!” he protested—though in truth he’d been accused of it before, mostly by the cousins who all came from large families and had to share everything, including their beds. As an only child, John Henry seldom had to share his room or his things with anyone else, though he didn’t see as how that made him selfish. It wasn’t his fault that his mother had never had another baby after he came along, or that his only sister, Martha Eleanora, had died as an infant before he was even born.

  Mattie, on the other hand, was the oldest of five children, and proud to be from a large and growing household. It seemed like her mother, Aunt Mary Anne, was always either caring for a new baby or expecting another. In fact, it was only since Uncle Rob had gone off to the war that Aunt Mary Anne had not been in the family way—though John Henry wasn’t supposed to notice such things. Still, as a curious youth, he couldn’t help but wonder where all those babies came from, and why Uncle Rob and Aunt Mary Anne should have so many and his own parents had only him. There was some mystery to it, he knew, and he intended to unravel it one day . . .

  “Curiosity killed the cat, John Henry,” Mattie whispered, as if reading his thoughts. “What are you ponderin’ on, anyhow? You’ve got that wonderin’ look on your face again.”

  “I’m wonderin’ how much longer this service is gonna last,” he snipped, uncomfortable at the way Mattie always seemed to see right through him. There were some thoughts a boy didn’t want to share with a girl. And to his relief, before Mattie could question him anymore the preacher gave a final and dramatic, “Amen!” and the men began their burden of covering over Grandpa Bob’s grave.

  It was the sound of the dirt going down, heavy spadefuls of damp red clay, that caught John Henry’s attention. His father’s was the first shovel to swing and drop, committing Grandpa Bob to the ground, then Uncle John and the rest of the pallbearers followed after and the ladies began to sing a hymn to cover the morbid sound.

  Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound,

  That saved a wretch like me!

  I once was lost, but now am found,

  Was blind, but now I see . . .

  Above the sound of the rest, John Henry could hear his mother’s voice, so sweet and musical that it seemed to float out over the cemetery, and he felt the poignant beauty of the moment rise up inside him.

  “John Henry!” Mattie exclaimed, “Take that hat back off your head! You know you can’t cover yourself ‘til after the service is through. It isn’t proper!”

  But John Henry didn’t answer, as he pulled his wool cap onto his sandy hair and down low.

  “John Henry!” she started again, but stopped when he turned and gave her one quick look from under the brim of the cap.

  “Well, it’s a funeral, isn’t it?” he said, sniffing back unmanly tears. “I reckon I’ve got a right to mourn a little.”

  “Oh, honey,” Mattie said, her scolding voice going soft, “so you really do care about Grandpa’s dyin’, after all!”

  “I told you I did,” John Henry said, defending himself as he struggled with the sudden emotion. Then he added, “Hey, Mattie? You won’t tell anybody, will you? I mean—you won’t tell my Pa that I was cryin’?”

  “I won’t tell a soul,” she replied. Then she leaned over and kissed him once on the cheek, a sisterly sign of affection. “It’ll be just our secret always, I promise. No one but me will ever know what a soft heart you really have. Now let’s go on and get to supper. You’re right, I am just starvin’!”

  “No, you go on ahead and get started without me. I think I’ll stay around here a little longer.”

  “Whatever for? I thought you couldn’t wait for this funeral to get over.”

  “I’m just not ready to go yet, that’s all. Save me a plate, all right?”

  And as Mattie picked up her skirts and went off with the rest of the mourners, their mood lightened now that the last benediction was spoken, John Henry stepped closer to the graveside. The fresh red earth was mounded over Grandpa Bob, a spray of red fall leaves taking the place of flowers on the grave. Then, with no one but the angels in heaven looking on, John Henry let the tears come. His grandfather may not have been a hero, but John Henry was going to miss him all the same.

  Dr. John Stiles Holliday, John Henry’s namesake uncle, was the only doctor in Fayetteville and, as such, had one of the nicest homes in town: two-stories tall with a row of white columns across the front and eight fireplaces inside, one in every room. To John Henry, the house seemed like a mansion with its glistening floors of Georgia heart pine and lofty ten-foot ceilings, its two front parlors and string of servants quarters out back. And though Uncle John’s home was really just a townhouse that doubled as a medical office, compared to John Henry’s family’s neat little cottage in Griffin, it was elegant.

  Now, with the eight fireplaces blazing and the funeral supper laid out on tables in the dining room, the parlor, and the front hall, the house looked fit for a party. Only the black draping that covered the mirrors over the fireplaces and the pictures on the walls showed that the family that lived there was in mourning. While neither Uncle John nor Aunt Permelia were superstitious folk, they still held with the old traditions and had ordered that all the reflective glass in the house be covered to keep the dearly departed’s soul from looking back into the mortal world—though John Henry wouldn’t have minded seeing his Grandfather’s ghost smiling back at him from the other side.

  While the adults took their funeral supper in the dining room and the parlor, the children were served from tables in the entry hall and had to seat themselves on the stairs, two cousins to every step. But though the stairway was crowded with Holliday children, they all knew that somebody was missing, and the talk soon turned to Cousin George, Uncle John’s oldest son, away at military school in Marietta.

  “. . . best school in the whole state!” George’s younger brother Robert said proudly. “My father says it’s a real honor to the whole family for George to be goin’ there. ‘Course George always was a smart one—like me!” he added with a laugh and a wink. “In fact, I bet ol’ George makes Captain of the Cadets real soon. He’s sixteen-years old now, you know, plenty old enough to see some service.”

  “Oh Robert!” cousin Mattie exclaimed, “you don’t think the cadets will have to go off to the War, do you? They’re just students still . . .”

  “That’s true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if General Lee called them all up to fight one of these days. You heard about the Battle of Sharpsburg back in September? They say Bobby Lee lost ten-thousand men on Antietam Creek up there in Maryland, almost a quarter of his whole army. He may need all us boys to go fight the Yanks, soon enough.”

  “Well I�
�d go, if they’d let me!” John Henry said fiercely, the War talk bringing out the Irish in him. “I’d whip those Yanks good!”

  “Don’t be silly, John Henry!” Mattie’s younger sister Lucy said with a laugh and a toss of her long dark braids. “You’re only eleven-years old, and mighty scrawny. You couldn’t even whip Cousin Robert, let alone a Yankee!”

  Twelve-year-old Robert Holliday grinned at that. “Don’t taunt him, Cousin Lucy. You know John Henry’s always ready to make a fight, even if he is little!”

  As the two boy cousins closest in age, John Henry and Robert always had a sort of sibling rivalry going on, though they were good friends most of the time. They even favored each other in looks, with the same Irish blue eyes and high Holliday cheekbones, and strangers sometimes mis-took them for brothers. Still it irked John Henry that Robert was older by a year and always would be, giving him a superior edge in the circle of cousins.

  “I’m ready to take you on, anyhow,” John Henry boasted. “I may be younger’n you, Robert, but I bet I could take you in a pistol fight. My Pa says a pistol makes all men look about the same size.”

  “Now stop it, both of you!” Mattie scolded. “Such talk! I thought you two were best of friends, not enemies.”

  “We’re friends, all right,” Robert replied. “It’s just a little friendly competition between cousins, that’s all. So what do you say, John Henry? Shall we make it a real competition?”

  “I’m game,” John Henry answered. “What’d you have in mind?”

  “Just a little tree jumpin’, that’s all.”

  “Tree jumpin’?” ten-year old Theresa asked. “What’s that?”

  Robert lowered his voice conspiratorially before answering, evidence that tree jumping was not approved of by the adults. “Tree jumpin’s a game George and I invented before he went off to school. There’s this oak tree outside my bedroom window, and if you stand in the windowsill and jump out far enough, you land right in the tops of the branches. Like landin’ on a feather bed, if you do it right.”

  “And if you do it wrong?” Lucy asked.

  “Then you break your neck, no doubt,” Mattie observed, “and land in a heap on the ground. Sounds like a stupid game to me, and I forbid John Henry to participate in it.”

  “And who made you my Mammy?” John Henry snapped back. “I swear Mattie Holliday, sometimes you act like an old maid! But I don’t guess I have to be scared of tree jumpin’ just ‘cause you are . . .” he let his words hang in the air, like a challenge, knowing that the one thing Mattie hated was to be called a coward. For all she was a girl, she had the same unthinking courage as the Holliday men, afraid of nothing.

  “I am not scared!”

  “Then prove it,” John Henry replied. “I dare you!”

  Mattie sat still for a moment, the color rising prettily in her pale cheeks. Then she gave a quick nod of her auburn head. “All right, I will! I’ll beat you both at your stupid tree jumpin’, and I’ll go first, as well!”

  “Oh no, Mattie!” Lucy gasped, “you’ll kill yourself for sure!”

  But Mattie had already pushed her plate off her lap and was climbing over the other cousins to the top of the stairs, where Robert’s room was the first on the second-floor hall.

  Robert’s jumping tree was a good six feet away from the window, though the spreading branches did reach close to the white painted clapboard siding of the house -- almost close enough to make a jump from the open window possible. But if the jumper didn’t leap quite far enough . . .

  “It’s a long way down, isn’t it?” five-year old Roberta asked as Mattie pulled her skirts up past the hem of her pantalettes and climbed onto the window sill. It was a twenty-foot fall at least onto the hard-packed earth of the side yard where Uncle John kept his wagon and carriage. Mattie hesitated just a moment, then took a deep breath and bravely jumped out into the cold night air.

  Lucy and Theresa both screamed at once, then Roberta and baby Catherine started crying, and all John Henry could think was that he was going to Hell for sure with his own cousin’s blood on his hands. He’d killed Mattie by daring her to jump out the window, just as much as if he’d pushed her.

  “Did she fall?” he asked, his heart racing.

  “I can’t tell,” Robert said, “but I didn’t hear her hit the ground.”

  Then, as if sharing the same thought, they both bolted from the room at the same time and went racing down the stairs and out of the house, heading for the side yard.

  “Mattie!” John Henry cried, and Robert echoed him, “Mattie, are you all right?”

  And to their relief and amazement, they heard an answering sound of laughter coming from under the jumping tree where Mattie was lying in a heap of leaves and broken branches, her skirts up over her head and her drawers shining white in the moonlight.

  “I did it!” she said, laughing and crying all at once. “Did you see me do it? I jumped out the window, just like you dared me to!”

  But before they could join in her excitement, there were scolding words behind them as Aunt Permelia’s little mulatto housemaid, Sophie, came running out onto the porch.

  “Mercy, Miss Mattie! I see you all right, and I’m ashamed to say your cousins seein’ you, too, with your underpinnin’s all open to the night air like that. Where’d your decency go, Missy? And what’s all this screamin’ and hollerin’ going on, anyhow? Shame on y’all! Makin’ a circus out here and your grampa jest buried this day and not even cold in his grave . . .”

  Sophie had uppity ways for a serving girl, John Henry thought, even if she was descended from the Governor of South Carolina, being the illegitimate daughter of the Governor by one of his favorite slave women. But good blood lines or not, Sophie should have kept her nosey self out of the cousins’ business, and he was about to tell her so when another voice spoke from out of the darkness—one that made John Henry stop cold in his tracks.

  “Leave them be, Sophie,” Henry Holliday said, as he stepped down into the side yard. “I’ll handle this,” and Sophie replied with a hasty “Yessir, Mr. Henry, Sir.”

  Henry Holliday was a commanding presence, standing militarily straight in the moonlight. Even in undress, without his officer’s frock coat and with his uniform vest unbuttoned and hanging loose on his illness-gaunt figure, Henry looked every inch the officer he was trained to be, accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed.

  “Well, Mattie, are you hurt?”

  “No Sir, Uncle Henry,” Mattie answered, quickly pulling her skirts down to cover her underthings. “I’m just tousled a little. My petticoats flew up and broke my fall, I guess. We were just playin’. Robert told me about his jumpin’ tree, and then John Henry dared me . . .”

  “Did he?” Henry asked. “Well, boys, it seems like we have some talkin’ to do. Sophie, you go on and take Miss Mattie back inside and let Dr. Holliday have a look at her, make sure there’s nothin’ broken. John Henry, you and Robert make yourselves comfortable.”

  Comfort, however, had little to do with a lecture by Major Holliday. Henry had never been much for conversation, and when it came to chastising his wayward son, he tended to be brief, to the point, and painfully blunt.

  “What the hell did you boys think you were doin’, anyhow?” he asked as soon as Mattie and the maid were safely out of earshot. “You could have got your cousin killed.”

  “We didn’t make her do it, Uncle Henry,” Robert said with an apologetic smile. “It was her idea. We were only bein’ gentlemanly, lettin’ her go first . . .”

  Henry’s sudden anger cut into Robert’s excuses. “Damndest pair of gentlemen I ever saw! Lettin’ a lady put her life on the line like that! John Henry, tell me a man’s duty toward his womenfolk.”

  John Henry’s answer came easily, having been memorized as part of his family training from toddlerhood. “A man’s duty is to protect his womenfolk, Sir.”

  “Yet you dared your cousin Mattie to jump from a window?”

  “Yessir.”
/>   “You’re pretty brash and bold with your dares, aren’t you, son? Have you ever jumped from that window yourself?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “Then how did you know it could even be done?”

  “‘Cause Robert said so, Sir,” John Henry explained in his own defense.

  “We never really did it, though,” Robert mumbled. “George and I just talked about how fun it would be to try it . . .”

  “Damn if I haven’t raised a fool for a son!” Henry exclaimed. “John Henry, next time you want to make a dare, you better make sure you can beat it yourself first!”

  “Yessir,” John Henry nodded.

  “Yessir, what?”

  “Yessir, I’ll make sure I can beat it myself.”

  “All right, then,” his father said, “let’s see you do it.”

  “Do what?” John Henry asked, bewildered.

  “Let’s see you beat the dare,” Henry said coolly. “I want to see you jump from that window yourself and make it down as good as little Mattie did. ‘Course without all those skirts and petticoats of hers, you’re likely as not to break your neck. Now get up those stairs and get to it. Robert, you go on inside and start makin’ your apologies to your cousin.”

  Robert nodded obediently, then darted into the house as though afraid his uncle would decide to include him in the punishment as well, for punishment it certainly was. Without the thrill of the game, without the excitement of all the cousins watching, jumping from the window seemed like a stupid and dangerous thing to do, indeed.

  But Henry had given his command, and John Henry resolutely climbed the stairs and made his way to Robert’s bedroom window. The room was empty now, the rest of the children all gathered around Mattie downstairs, and the only sound John Henry could hear was the loud thumping of his own heart as he climbed up into the open window, balancing his smooth-soled leather boots on the wide window sill, and looked out into the night.

  The limbs of the jumping tree were a black silhouette against the moonlit sky, and down below in the darkness his father was waiting for him to prove himself against a dare. With heart racing, he put one foot out the window and took a quick breath the way he had seen Mattie do, steeling himself to step into thin air. But just before he jumped, a strong hand grabbed hold of him and pulled him back into the room.