The River Between Us

The River Between Us

cjfromance

The war had come to Natchez like a fever — slow at first, then all at once, burning everything it touched.

Louise Beaumont stood at the gallery railing of Hargrove Hall, watching the last of the season's cotton rot in the lower fields. The overseer was gone. Half the hands had walked north toward the Union lines. Her father lay in his bed upstairs, one lung ruined by a Yankee ball at Vicksburg, rattling with every breath like something broken inside a clock.

She was twenty-two years old and she was all that remained of the Beaumont name.

The sound of hooves on the river road drew her attention. She did not reach for the pistol her father kept on the hall table — not yet. She watched instead, the way her mother had taught her to watch, with still hands and sharp eyes.

The rider who came through the gate was not a soldier.

He wore the dust of a long journey rather than a uniform, though his coat bore the faded insignia of a Union Army sutler. His horse was a dark bay, tired but well-cared-for, and he himself looked much the same — lean, weathered, the kind of man who had been through enough to stop being careless about it. He was perhaps thirty, with dark hair that needed cutting and eyes the particular gray of the Mississippi before a storm.

He looked up at her and removed his hat.

"Ma'am. I'm looking for a place to water my horse and, if the Lord is willing, myself. I mean no harm to this household."

His voice was Northern. Ohio or Indiana, she thought — not the clipped tones of New England, but something broader, plainer. A working man's voice.

Louise did not move from the railing. "This is private property."

"Yes, ma'am. Your sign at the gate is still up, though I notice the fence beside it is not."

She looked where he indicated. The east fence had been pulled down — by whom, she did not know. The war passed through quietly sometimes, taking things without announcing itself.

"Your name," she said.

"Samuel Crane. I was with General Grant's commissary until Vicksburg fell. I have my discharge papers if you'd like to examine them."

She had not expected that. Most men who came now — Confederate deserters, foragers, the desperate and the lost — did not offer their papers. They offered lies or threats.

"What are you now, Mr. Crane, if you are no longer a soldier?"

He looked at her steadily. "Trying to find my way home to Cincinnati. Though I'll admit the river roads are not cooperating."

Louise descended the gallery steps slowly, her skirts heavy in the August heat. She came to the bottom step and no farther, which kept her precisely at the height of a mounted man's eye. It was a calculation her mother had taught her as well — never look up at a man you don't trust, and never look down at one you might need.

"There is a pump behind the kitchen house," she said. "Your horse may drink from the trough. I will not offer you more than that."

"That is more than generous, ma'am."

He dismounted without flourish, and led the bay around the side of the house as she'd indicated. Louise followed at a distance, telling herself she was being prudent, that she needed to watch him, that she had every practical reason to keep him in her sight.

She told herself this with great conviction, all the way to the kitchen yard, where Samuel Crane worked the pump handle with careful, unhurried strokes and let his horse drink in peace, and then bent over the trough himself and splashed water across his face and neck. He did not look at her. He gave her the courtesy of his inattention, which somehow made her watch him more.

"You're alone here," he said at last. It was not a question.

"My father is inside."

"I heard him coughing when I rode past the window." A pause. "I am sorry."

The apology landed somewhere unexpected. She did not know what to do with the kindness of a stranger, not anymore, not since the war had made kindness so rare a thing that she'd nearly forgotten its weight.

"The road north turns to mud past the Fayette crossroads," she said instead. "You'll lose a day if you try it before it dries."

Samuel Crane looked up at her then, and the gray of his eyes held something she had not anticipated — not hunger, not calculation, but a simple and unguarded attention, as though she were the first real thing he'd seen in a very long time.

"I suppose," he said quietly, "I could wait another day."

The magnolias along the fence line were rotting on the branch, their white blooms gone to brown at the edges. Louise Beaumont stood in the heat and the ruin of her inheritance and felt, for reasons she could not entirely account for, something in her chest lean cautiously toward the light.

He stayed three days.

Louise told herself it was practical. The road north did not dry. Her father's cough worsened on the second night, and Samuel Crane had some rudimentary knowledge of medicine — enough, at least, to brew a poultice from the camphor and cloves in the kitchen stores and sit with a sick man through the dark hours without complaint or expectation of reward. She had not asked him to. He had simply appeared at the bedroom doorway, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and said, *tell me what needs doing.*

She had told him. He had done it.

By the third morning she had stopped being surprised by him, which was itself a kind of danger she did not fully name.

They worked side by side in the kitchen garden while the sun climbed and the river insects sang their endless monotonous sermon in the grass. He dug where the beds had gone hard and neglected; she planted the late-season seeds she'd been hoarding in a tin since April. Neither of them spoke much. There was a particular intimacy in shared labor, she was discovering — something the parlor and the drawing room had never taught her, something the war had stripped her down to.

"You had people to do this before," he said at last. Not cruelly. Simply.

"Yes."

"And now you do it yourself."

"I do everything myself now." She pressed a seed into the earth with her thumb. "I find I am more capable than I was raised to believe."

Samuel leaned on the handle of the spade and looked at her with that unguarded attention she had come to recognize, the quality of it like water finding its own level — unhurried, unashamed.

"I believe that entirely," he said.

The afternoon brought a letter from the county seat, delivered by a boy on a mule who didn't bother dismounting. Louise read it standing in the road, the paper trembling in her hands — though whether from the heat or from what the words contained, she could not have said. When she came back to the garden, Samuel took one look at her face and set down the spade.

"My father's brother is coming from Baton Rouge," she said. "He has applied to the Federal authority for the property. He says the estate cannot be managed by a woman alone." Her voice was level. She had learned to keep it level. "He will be here within the fortnight."

The silence between them changed character, became weighted.

"Is he right?" Samuel asked. "About the managing of it?"

Louise looked at him sharply. The answer that rose first was furious and proud, and she swallowed it back, because underneath it was the truth, and the truth was more complicated and more frightening than her anger. She looked out at the ruined fields, the broken fence, the great house with its peeling columns and its one dying man inside it.

"No," she said. "He is not right."

"Then you'll fight him."

"I have no resources to fight him. I have seeds in a tin and a father who will not last the month." Her voice cracked on the last word, just slightly, and she hated it — hated the sound of her own breaking, standing in front of this stranger who was no longer quite a stranger. She pressed her lips together and looked away toward the river, that brown indifferent current that had witnessed everything this land had ever done and remembered none of it.

She felt rather than heard him move. He came to stand beside her, not touching, but close enough that she was aware of the warmth of him against the afternoon heat.

"Louise." Her name in his mouth was a careful thing, spoken as though he understood it cost him something to use it. "I have a little money. Not a great deal. Enough to see a lawyer retained in Natchez."

She turned to look at him. "Why would you do that."

It was not truly a question. They both understood it was not a question.

Samuel Crane looked at the river too for a moment, and she watched his profile — the honest, unbeautiful lines of it, the jaw that needed shaving, the slight furrow between his brows that she had come to read as thought rather than displeasure. Then he turned and looked at her directly, the way he always did, without evasion.

"Because I came through your gate three days ago meaning to water my horse," he said, "and instead I found something I was not expecting to find, and I am not a man who walks away from a thing simply because it is inconvenient or complicated or because someone will think it strange."

The river moved south, as it always had, carrying whatever the war had put into it — sorrow and timber and the wreckage of a world that had organized itself around a cruelty so profound that its unraveling had broken everything, the guilty and the innocent alike.

"I cannot accept money from you," she said.

"I am not offering you charity. I am offering you a reason to let me come back." He paused. "If there is one. If you want there to be one."

Louise Beaumont had not cried since her mother's funeral, three years before the war began. She did not cry now. But something in her chest opened, slowly and with some pain, the way a door opens that has been shut too long against the cold.

"The road to Cincinnati," she said at last.

"Will keep."

Above them, a mockingbird loosed its borrowed song into the August air — some tune it had stolen from another bird, in another season, and made entirely its own. Louise looked at the man beside her. The war was not over. Her father was dying. Her uncle was coming with papers and legal authority and the full weight of a world that did not believe in her.

She had seeds in a tin.

She had herself.

And now, improbably, standing in the wreckage of everything she had known, she had this: a man who had nowhere urgent to be, looking at her as though she were worth staying for.

"There is a supper," she said. "If you would like to stay for it."

Samuel Crane put his hat back on and picked up the spade.

"Yes," he said simply. "I would.”