The Daily Brief

Prelude – In Margaret’s House

Over that winter, which was the fifty-third year of her life, and the last winter of the war that folk had begun to call “The War Between the States”, a slow creeping paralysis at last confined Margaret Williamson to her bedroom. It was not her original bedroom, upstairs in the newer wing of a sprawling house in a park of meadows and fruit trees, which were all that was left of the farm that her father had established when the nearby town had been called Waterloo on the Colorado. Cruelly, the paralysis had advanced over the last two years, remorselessly taking control of her body and her life – she who had always appeared to be a domestic general in command of a small army, a whirlwind of activity in her vast, sprawling house; a hostess of no small repute, with many friends and the mother of sons. It was a particularly cruel twist of fate that her body should be first and worst affected, leaving her mind, her will and her memory unaffected. Margaret resisted being transformed into a helpless invalid, fighting as she had always fought, with resolute calm and by giving up as little as possible, every step of the way. When she could no longer climb the stairs, when she could no longer command her own lower limbs, and sat most of the day in a chair with wheels, in which her maids pushed her from room to room as she saw about the business of running a boarding house, she ordered that the room next to the private family parlor be cleared out, and that her own bedroom furniture and all her private possessions, her clothes and ornaments be brought downstairs and installed there.

“You and poor Daddy Hurst cannot be put to the bother of carrying me upstairs, morning and night,” she said to Hetty, who was her cook and long-time friend.

“I wish you would do as the doctor advises, Marm,” Hetty answered, “And take the water cure… sure and ‘tis the best thing…”

“Too much trouble,” Margaret answered, with indomitable cheer, intended to comfort Hetty as much as herself. “This way, I need not tire myself, and perhaps I may begin schooling Amelia in the art of keeping a large house full of guests and boarders… as well as being a political hostess.”

Hetty mumbled a Hibernian rudery under her breath, and Margaret sighed. Blunt, practical and Irish, Hetty had about as much in common with Margaret’s daughter-in-law as a wild mustang from the Llano did with a pedigreed Kentucky racing horse.

“She is my son’s wife,” Margaret answered, “And the mother of my grandson. So I do have some hope of her. I want so much for her to take my place… for her sake, as much as anything else.”

“An’ them as are in Hell want cold water,” Hetty riposted. Margaret sighed again and patted Hetty’s work-worn hand.

“As I can testify, Hetty – there are so few respectable avenues for a woman of good family to provide for her children, for her family,” Margaret said, momentarily distracted. Her hand felt numb, stiff and lumpish, as she moved it. There was a new chill striking her to the heart. So had her good friend Colonel Ford warned her – he who had once practiced medicine, who had worn himself ragged attending on the wife that he loved so dearly. So might her own husband have seen to her needs and to her care… alas that he had been twenty years older than herself, and struck down by camp-fever two years ago. Margaret had mourned for him as she saw to the necessary rituals, for she had loved him – not as dearly as she had loved the husband of her youth, the father of her sons, but she had loved him well… and he would have recognized and mapped the progress of her affliction. That was his way, for he was a logical man. She took her hand from Hetty’s and surreptitiously flexed her fingers. No, it was only a momentary, fleeting thing – but so had it seemed those many months ago, when she began to feel that numbness in her feet and ankles, began to stumble and falter. So had it progressed, relentlessly over the months, independent of events… which were as catastrophic to that world outside as these small, inexorable limitations that her illness placed upon herself.

In the end, as winter turned haltingly to spring, as the fortunes of the Confederacy began to falter, it seemed that Margaret’s body, her strength – and her very will, as indomitable as the will of the men who fought for glory, for the bonny star-crossed flag of the Confederate States – all began to fail at once. Which Margaret, in that private corner of her mind, found ironic in the extreme, for she had always been a Unionist. In her secret heart, she was an abolitionist as well – a dangerous sympathy, indeed, which practically none in her wide circle of friends had ever suspected. Margaret had much skill and long experience in keeping her true feelings veiled. The old black fortune-teller had said as much, the conjure-woman with her hands like wrinkled monkey-hands, who looked into the lines of Margaret’s hand and revealed the future mapped in them for her, sitting on a weather-bleached tree-trunk cast up on the muddy shore of the river. That very day that Margaret’s father had brought his six yoke of oxen, his heavy-laden wagon, and his family, across the great River at Nacogdoches and come to take up the land that had been promised to him by Mr. Austin and by Alois Becker’s friend, the Baron de Bastrop.

“I was just ten years old,” she remarked one chill day in February. A bitter cold wind stirred the bare grey limbs of the trees outside. The sun cast their eldritch shadows on the scrubbed pine boards at the foot of the French doors that led out to the verandah. Margaret’s daughter-in-law Amelia had wanted to draw the curtains against the icy draft that seeped around the cracks. But Margaret had demurred, saying that she wished to see the outside, not be closed away like an invalid. Amelia did not say anything in reply, but Margaret read her thoughts, as she settled Margaret against the pillows. Amelia rustled away – even her crinoline sounded disapproving, Margaret thought.

“When were you ten years old, Gran-mere?” asked her grandson. Little Horace, just four years old; although the smallest, he was yet the most tenacious of her attendants these days; like a particularly devoted and affectionate lap-dog. He laid on his stomach on the hearth-rug among his toys, heels in the air and carefully setting up a row of painted tin soldiers.

“When we first came to Texas, Horrie,” She answered. “And the conjure-woman told us our fortunes. Well, my fortune, for that day was my tenth birthday. That is why I remember so well. My brother Rudi was just eight, and my little brother was three, a little younger than you are. The conjure-woman did not tell much of my brothers’ fortunes – I thought that I was being especially favored, since I was the oldest… but later I began to think that perhaps she did truly see their futures and wished not to tell us of what she had seen.” Horrie’s eyes rounded in astonishment.

“Where did you live before then, Gran’mere?” he asked, breathless with curiosity. “and where did you meet the conjure-woman?

“We lived in the North, Horrie,” Margaret answered. “The conjure-woman… I don’t know where she came from… we met her the day that we crossed the river into Texas. Only it was part of Mexico, then.”

Horrie’s eyes rounded even more.

“You lived in the North, with the Yankees?” He breathed, as if this were the most horrible circumstance imaginable. “Gran’mere… was your papa a Yankee?” Margaret added hastily, “It was a very, very long time ago, Horrie. Before the war was even thought of… there was no talk of Yankees and Rebs, then. We thought of all as one country, the United States.” Margaret sighed a little, for Horrie’s father, her oldest son had fallen on the first day of battle at Gettysburg, not fifteen miles away from where she and her parents had lived, long ago. “It seems a little unreal to me… that time before. Sometimes I think I was not really born until then, that all before we crossed the river were just dreams.”
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