San Antone. V. J. Banis

the garden, and it gets the breeze from the Gulf; the weather’s been mighty warmish. Your daughter will be right here, right next door to you, and your sons across the hall, or we can switch them about if you’d rather. Such lovely children—they must give you a great deal of pleasure. Your nigras will be just fine now, in the sheds. Except for your own maids, of course, and the children’s mammy; we’ll put down pallets in the attic for them. I know you’ll want them close at hand when you need them—it’s so hard getting strange darkies to do things the way you’re used to having them done. But I do just want to say one thing: I want you to treat ours as your own while you’re here. If there’s anything you want, you just let them know, and if they don’t hop to it, don’t you be shy of telling me. Mr. Montgomery likes a smooth-running house. Course, I expect you’re used to that, coming from Eaton Hall. Mr. Mallory’s told me how lovely it is.”

      She took a deep breath, smiling, and waited for her guest to respond to all this.

      “It was,” Joanna said, but the past tense seemed to slip by the other woman unnoticed. “I do hope we won’t be too much trouble while we’re here.”

      “I can’t dream how.”

      “Well, it is difficult, with a houseful of people—just finding time to be alone, a chance to relax....”

      “Oh, I don’t care if I ever have a moment alone—I hate being all by myself. And I never relax—it makes me too nervous. I can’t tell you, Miz Harte, how I’m looking forward to hearing all about Charleston. It’s been ten years....” Alice Montgomery made an uncharacteristic pause and sighed. “I expect you’ll find us hopelessly out of fashion here in Galveston.”

      “And San Antonio?” Joanna asked on an impulse. “Have you journeyed there?”

      The teary eyes blinked with astonishment. “San Antonio? Oh, my, no, no one does—oh, I am sorry, I didn’t mean—”

      “It’s all right,” Joanna assured her. “I expect you’re entirely correct.”

      * * * *

      In fact, as it turned out, quite a few people were apparently planning to make the trip with them.

      “Word gets around when there’s a party going,” Lieutenant Price explained. “People who have some reason to make the trip arrange to make it together. Safety in numbers. And the company helps the time pass more pleasantly.”

      It would be several weeks before they were ready to go. Not only must a wagon be built and a team purchased, but supplies had to be laid in, some of them especially ordered and brought to Galveston on one of the many ships that sailed into the harbor.

      Provisioning a wagon for a trip such as the one they were making was not, as Joanna came to learn, as easy as it might seem. Space was limited, the means of keeping food fresh in the Texas heat virtually nonexistent.

      Beef had to be dried into jerky. Fruits—apples, apricots, peaches—were dried, too, into leathery strips not unlike the beef.

      Water was precious; there would be weeks, the lieutenant informed them, when there was none available except what they’d brought with them in specially constructed barrels. Melissa, seeing one of the barrels, wailed, “But I’ll need that much for bathing.” She was unreservedly homesick for South Carolina, and not at all shy about letting everyone know.

      Fortunately, the adventure had not yet begun to pale for the boys. Lieutenant Price took them with him one day on his way to the docks. They came home, to Joanna’s surprise, wearing trousers of a peculiar cut and fabric in place of the woolen ones they’d left in.

      “They’re called ‘dungarees,’” Jay Jay informed her proudly. “Lieutenant Price says all the cowboys are wearing them these days.”

      “Dugris,” Gregory corrected his brother. “They come from the Bahamas. And they’re ever so much more comfortable than the woolies.”

      “They wear like iron, ma’am,” Lieutenant Price added, “and they are comfortable, especially on the trail. I guarantee your boys will find them much better for the trip.”

      “And we saw an Indian, too, a real one,” Jay Jay went on.

      “An Indian?” Joanna shot the lieutenant a worried glance, but his smile was reassuring.

      “Nothing to worry about,” he said. “This one’s perfectly tame. His name’s William Horse and he’s going to join us on the train. He’s quite civilized—I’ve talked with him at length myself. Been to boarding school back east, but his home’s around San Antone. I thought he might be handy to have along.”

      “He’s Nasoni,” Gregory smiled. “The word Texas comes from a Nasoni word. It means friends, or allies.”

      Joanna laughed and shook her head. “Honestly, Gregory, I don’t know where you learn all these things.”

      “From Lieutenant Price,” Gregory said matter-of-factly.

      It sometimes seemed to Joanna that if it weren’t for the young army lieutenant, they would never have managed the trip to San Antonio—or, as he called it, San Antone. With their first setback, Lewis had lost that industry and determination with which he had first approached the venture. He still spoke glowingly of what lay before them—apparently, in his inner vision, some sort of Garden of Eden awaiting only his presence to make it bloom—but as the days passed, he grew less and less capable of coping with the myriad details essential to their departure. More and more, Joanna and the lieutenant between them assumed the responsibility for their preparations.

      * * * *

      Lewis and Clifford Montgomery had apparently hit it off well. They were frequently out together, for increasingly long periods of time, sometimes all day and most of the night. Alice seemed quite willing to accept her husband’s often flimsy explanations for their absence, though Joanna thought she herself had a better idea what they were about.

      When they were in the house, the two men were, more often than not, closeted together in the host’s study. Lewis’s progressively boisterous laugh, and the clink of glasses, could be heard often—as could, later at night, the falls Lewis took on the stairs on his way to their bed.

      Clifford Montgomery had, it seemed, a thirst to equal Lewis’s, though he held his liquor a little better.

      Alice Montgomery was a pleasant enough woman but her endless chatter soon wore on Joanna’s nerves. Joanna was used to her solitude and found herself missing it sorely. Even with guests at Eaton Hall, she’d had plenty of places to hide out by herself when the need came on her.

      She discovered the house by night.

      The household retired early, except for the two men drinking downstairs. Eventually they, too, came up and the slaves retired to the attic and the outbuildings. There were whole rooms with no one in them, not even a light burning to people them with furniture and shadows. She discovered them by accident. She woke late one night to find that Lewis had not come to bed. Once before, he had passed out on the steps and spent the whole night sleeping there, till the slaves had found him in the morning. Thinking that might have happened again, Joanna donned her peignoir and went looking for him.

      She did not find Lewis—she supposed he was with the Negroes. She found the empty, blessedly silent house instead.

      Even better, she found the gazebo, off by itself in the farthest corner of the garden, scented with blossoms, teased by the welcome breeze that blew in from the Gulf.

      She took to going there late at night; while Lewis snored unevenly, only the sleepy whisperings of the palm fronds disturbed the silence in the garden.

      Not that she was alone. San Antonio sat there with her, the whole of Texas came to visit, and mock her, and mutter dire imprecations of what lay before her. And the sober spirit that fled Lewis’s body when he drank, sometimes that was there as well.

      Chapter Five

      They had been there six weeks when Lieutenant Price