“Hannah, you come along with me while I ask aunt Rachel to unlock the press. We’ll need all the long tablecloths and they’ll have to be pressed. I’ll need four more spoons. These are those lovely French ones uncle Jackson brought from New Orleans. You tell Simmy to be mighty careful with them, Dilsey. Come along, Hannah. People may begin coming in today. There’s a lot to do.”
“Young Master Jack, he comin’?” asked Hannah boldly, grinning at the bright flush that warmed the young girl’s face.
Emily, fifteen, imperiously lovely, red-haired, shook her head sadly. “Uncle Jackson won’t let him come. I think it’s mean. He’s making Jack stay on in that old law school when he wants to be at home for Christmas.”
“Learnin’,” commented Hannah. “It mighty fine. Do Mis’ Rachel read to me outen her Bible, glory just shine around. And when the General spout big words out of books I gits shivers up my back.”
Emily hurried along the bricked way that set the kitchen apart from the big house. The wind was fresh and keen off the Tennessee hills and she drew her shawl close around her slender shoulders. In the house huge wood fires burned in three fireplaces but the hall where the curving stairs came down was chilly. She opened the dining room door and slipped inside quickly.
Rachel Jackson, with a Negro woman helping and a half-grown boy up on a stool, was getting china down from a high corner cupboard.
Aunt Rachel was getting heavy, Emily noted, and her breath quick and short. She gasped occasionally as she bent over the table, counting the plates the Negress set down, laughing a little as she straightened and drew a long breath.
“Law, I must be getting old, Emily. I get so short-winded every time I exert myself the least bit. I declare these china plates are still the prettiest ones I’ve got. Not a nick in one of them. That’s because I’ve always washed them myself. These came all the way from Pittsburgh by boat. My gracious, that was twenty-seven years ago! Brother Samuel went all the way up into Kentucky some place with the wagon to meet the boat and bring the goods to Nashville to your uncle Jackson’s store. Indians were everywhere too, those days. I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep till Brother Sam got back and my husband too—he was away off to Philadelphia. Sam was gone forty six days and my husband gone for two months.”
“You’ve been alone so much, aunt Rachel. If ever I get a husband I won’t let him leave me for even one day.”
Rachel let her breath out slowly. There was that little pain again, that came sometimes. She used Magic Sanitive Salve faithfully as her husband directed but it didn’t seem to do much good.