Fault Line

Words by Amy Jane Lynch

Art by Elmin Marais

Thomas Kincaid enjoys his brandy bitters, golden-brown hue with hints of red, ice tinkling when he sips. Far cry from the rotgut whiskey the Old Man drank.

The ice alone a cause for celebration. Kincaid ordered a block of it all the way from St. Louis for this dinner party, two hundred pounds when the teamsters delivered it secreted within a mountain of sawdust like a tomb at the center of a pyramid. Precious. It is locked in the spring house which is always locked of course, but especially now.

Ben Rogers lifts his glass to Kincaid. “To your father, God rest his soul. We will never see another his equal.”

“Hear. Hear.” The men around the table stand to toast the Old Man, raise their glasses to the empty chair tilted forward at the head of the table, linen napkin spread across its back. The men’s wives lower their eyes briefly, respect for the dead, and sip their brandy too. An awkward moment. The family is still in mourning, but Kincaid and his wife Cecelia decided this intimate dinner for close friends does not count as entertaining.

“What did he amass, three thousand acres?” Rogers asks. Holds near that much himself.

“Something like that.” Kincaid takes a long sip of his brandy, feels its bracing comfort in his chest. With the Old Man dead, he spends his nights sorting through paper—tangled inheritance of acreage, rents, debts, injury, anger. He empties his glass, twists to signal Dorsey for more brandy, his whiskers rake the stiff collar that grasps his chin. She moves begrudgingly from her place at the wall. Kincaid is overwarm. Good thing he chose the linen waistcoat rather than the wool. Hard to know this time of year, dog days of summer.

“He had the kind of courage you don’t see any more.” This from Alan Grant. Owns bottomland along the river, richest in the valley.

“Here’s to courage then.” Rogers again, man who loves a party, loves a toast.

Kincaid nods to his father’s empty chair. “To courage.” But before he drinks, a sudden memory. He sees the Old Man ahorse, yellow sun behind him, riding crop raised overhead. His father preferred to beat things from on high, his saddle the best seat for it. Sweat rolls down Kincaid’s middle back like a fingertip traced over the skin. The dining room windows are open to the evening, but the day’s heat lingers. Just outside a mockingbird improvises. One song, another, a third in abrupt succession.

“Think of it,” Grant’s wife Emma Mae says, eyes wide. “Living here with the savages the way he did. Do you think he really killed dozens of them like they say?” She leans forward with excitement.

“Who knows?” Kincaid attempts a laugh. “The Old Man’s stories grew with age.” Still, the house itself attests a bloody history, thick walls of limestone slabs, as much fort as house. But all of that was half a century ago, everything is different now, Kincaid tells himself.

From the foot of the table, Cecelia echoes Kincaid’s thinking. “Thank God we are more civilized now.” Brutal, she thinks, all these years I had to tolerate that Old Man’s brutal stories at my table. She shudders, recalls the grizzled hanks of skin and hair strung from the Old Man’s powder horn. She never dared look straight at them.

Emma Mae persists, her voice a saucy whisper. “Do we not have courage too, living among the savages of our own time?”

Silence. Time inhales and holds its breath. Kincaid glances at Emma Mae’s glass, is her carelessness the brandy’s doing? Grant should rein in his wife.

Ever the hostess, Cecelia cuts through the tension. “Savages? Do you mean Whigs or Democrats?” Under cover of laughter she cuts her eyes at Dorsey standing expressionless not six feet away. There will be tell of Emma Mae’s remark in the cabins tonight. The little fool.

Now from the hallway, a clamor of high-pitched voices, the hiss of slippers. Cecelia lifts her hands wide. “Oh look! The girls are here.”

Seven little girls enter. Layered dresses like tiered cakes frosted with ribbon and lace. The dress parade is a tradition among the families. Afterward the nurses will take the girls, and the meal will commence.

Kincaid’s daughter Martha Jane poses in the doorway, her wide skirt sways. She carries a fan, the privilege earned last year when she turned nine. She lifts her chin, snaps open the fan with a pop like a firecracker. All eyes swing to her. Kincaid smiles to himself. No doubt her mother will address this bit of showboating later. A young lady should appear unaffected.

The girls assemble in a line and curtsy, the parents applaud. “Oh my, how beautiful.” “Look at those dresses!” “Lovely!”

Meantime dark faces cluster in the doorframe, the girls’ nurses and enslaved companions. But one has slipped into the room, slinks along the wall of flowered paper. Martha Jane’s companion Evelyn, darting eyes and skinny legs. Guileful, Kincaid thinks, too bold by far. When the Old Man bought Evelyn’s mother, the undersized child was an afterthought included at buyer’s discretion. The mother, dead now, proved tubercular. A poor purchase.

Martha Jane glides to her father, head held straight so as not to jostle her ringlets. Fingertips on his arm, she rises to tiptoe, whispers. “May I play outside?” Knows better than to ask her mother.

Kincaid glances to the window. Lace panels belly with warm air. In the side yard, his sons and the other boys run and shout, a game of chase. Conspirator now, Kincaid makes a show of straightening Martha Jane’s shoulder ruffle, presses his cheek to hers and frees her. “Yes, but with your nurse, and only if the other girls go.”

Martha Jane exhibits a smile for the room, sails back to the hallway. Evelyn slips out shadow-like behind her.

“Now for supper.” Cecelia nods to Dorsey who lights silver candelabras and brings them to the table. Meantime the kitchen servants, as Cecelia likes to call them, begin service. First to emerge from the pantry is Sithy, in her hands a platter of boiled ham wide as a wheel of cheese. She is joined by kitchen negros in rotation, platter after platter. Chicken pie, fried sausage, rice, sweet potatoes, yeast bread, potato pudding, peas, string beans and pickled cucumber, all amid cries of approbation. But it is Sithy they see.

Waves of dark hair tied back against her neck with a yellow ribbon, white lace collar, sheen of quality cotton in her fitted bodice and wide skirt. Sithy’s clothing is part of Kincaid’s arrangement with her, much like the Old Man’s arrangement once was with the girl’s mother.

The wives around the table manufacture the chatter of requisite cheerfulness, but Kincaid sees their glances. The men, too, run their eyes over Sithy as she serves. Their wives ignore this. Something wives endure, part of their arrangement.

Sithy is not kitchen help, she should not be here. Kincaid knows this indecorous display is due to Cecelia’s displeasure with him. Sithy isn’t showing yet, but her breasts are swollen beneath her dress. Kincaid has toyed with the idea of freeing Sithy. Once in a rash moment, he even promised her he would as soon as the Old Man died. Now he frowns the length of the table at his wife; she affects not to notice. His neck prickles inside the starched collar.

Children shriek and katydids trill out in the yard. Kincaid remembers how it felt to be a boy on evenings like this, running breathlessly while daylight faded, lamp light from the windows shaping in soft rectangles on the grass. Back in those days when he was young and studying at a northern school, he swore he’d free all of them. But the Old Man left the estate in deep arrears. What can he do? He signals Dorsey for more brandy.

Rogers has shifted the conversation to horses. They all talk up their favorites, and the men lay bets. Servants circle the table offering more of everything. The chicken pie is especially good tonight and the yeast rolls sweet. As the light outside softens, conversation turns to politics. There’s bloodshed in Kansas between free soilers and proslavery settlers, and here the ’billies who farm the hills would, Kincaid believes, happily bring the planters down. Border states like Tennessee have two economies, two faces. Slave holders look south, the ’billies north. “It’s like living on a fault line,” he says to general agreement.

Just then, there’s a shout in the hallway. “I will tell!” Martha Jane stomps into the room, face tear-swollen, ringlets tangled. “Papa, Malcolm is ruining Hide the Switch!” Each word a sob. The other girls and their nurses flutter in the doorway like anxious hens.

Hide the Switch, a game all children play. A switch is cut from a tree and hidden. The child who finds it chases the others, attempts to whip them. Game of pretend.

Kincaid touches his napkin to his lips. “Excuse me.” In the hallway girls hubbub around him like frothy water, push him to the porch. Martha Jane yanks his hand. “See! That’s not how you play it!” In the twilight, the girls’ enslaved companions are lined up, arms pinned behind them by the boys. The oldest of the boys, Kincaid’s son Malcolm, walks along the line, abruptly thwacks a hickory wand across Evelyn’s face. Way you’d smack a horse to get it moving, hard enough to mark the hide but not to break it, a differentiation Kincaid recognizes.

Rogers and Grant have brought their drinks outside. Kincaid is aware they watch him. Already tonight, Cecelia has defied him in front of his friends. Now this. The boys turn to their fathers on the porch and wait. Even the katydids are quiet.

Kincaid exhales heavily. “Let them go.” The boys release the wenches who sprint to the porch and form a tearful huddle.

To his son, “Come here. Give me that.”

Malcolm shrugs and climbs the steps, hands over a switch so limber it trembles in Kincaid’s hand. “It’s just a game, Father. The switch is not even cured.”

“You are too old for children’s games.” Twelve, the boy is twelve, old enough to know. Malcolm is a good boy mostly, Kincaid has never beaten him, never had cause, and besides, did not want to be the man his father was. But that shrug, the disrespect in it, and now the boy rolls his eyes. Kincaid’s mouth goes hard. He lifts the switch and lays on twice with strength across his son’s shoulders. Malcolm yelps and Kincaid’s own heart startles. For a moment he feels dizzy. The armpits of his shirt are soaked.

Malcolm pounds down the steps and round the corner of the house. Kincaid steadies himself on the porch post. He flings the switch out into the darkening yard. The fathers shepherd the children inside.

In the hallway Martha Jane tugs Kincaid down to her level, mouth to his ear. “My stomach hurts, Papa. It hurts when Malcolm switches Evelyn.”

Still shaken, Kincaid forces himself to focus. “What is it, little lamb?” His breath tastes sour.

“My stomach hurts when Malcolm hits.”

Kincaid smooths tears from her cheek with his thumb. “I know, I know. But it will get better when you grow up, I promise. Now go and play.”

Nurses attend the girls up the staircase, tearful companions in their wake, Evelyn among them, hand to her cheek. Kincaid mops his forehead with his handkerchief.

Back in the dining room, Cecelia has ordered the table cleared, dessert served. Custard, coffee, fruit and nuts. Servants dismissed to the kitchen house, wives in deep discussion. “What can we do? At times their behavior compels us to harshness,” Cecelia is saying.

Children or negros? Kincaid wonders. He tugs at his collar.

Emma Mae’s voice quivers. “You are lucky your house is stone. They cannot easily burn you out.”

Negroes then. Or abolitionists. Either way, dinner conversation always devolves to fire and foreboding these days. Fault line tremors.

Grant lays his hand over Emma Mae’s. “Try not to worry so, my dear.” Their fingers entwine on the linen tablecloth, but the candles sputter, shadows leap against the walls. Fear owns the room now, so real Kincaid imagines he hears it snigger.

* * *

After the guests leave Kincaid lights an oil lamp, repairs to his desk with more iced brandy, works at setting straight his father’s affairs. But each new layer of paperwork only compounds his debt. Is anything mine? Kincaid wonders. In the early morning hours, he pushes back from the desk abruptly, rubs his eyes and climbs the stairs toward bed, but stops on the landing, turns to the Old Man’s bedroom and pushes open the door.

Room like a shipwreck, as if the Old Man confounded everything a-purpose before going. The old rope bed is heaped high, shape of an outsized animal crouching there in the dark. Kincaid’s shadow tracks along the wall.

He examines a mound of clothing. Rough things—stained hunting shirts, a heavy duster, smallclothes, brogans, a threadbare tartan, horsehair sporran—each giving off the Old Man’s vinegary smell.

Kincaid’s hand lands on something supple. Leather leggings, the old-fashioned kind men used to tie onto a belt or breechcloth with rawhide strings. God knows how old they are. They smell of soot, somehow fresh. And here, the Old Man’s long knife in its leather sheath, and his powder horn, actual hollow horn like nobody uses any more, the strap hung with hanks of blackened skin and straggly hair. Kincaid thinks he sees them stir.

Among the jumble, the Old Man’s riding crop. Braided leather, frayed quirt, bone-carved handle. Kincaid recalls how his father ruined a good horse once. Beautiful horse.

The crop is Kincaid’s now. His shoulders stiffen. He hesitates, then grasps the handle, bone warming to his touch. Kincaid thinks about that ruined horse, they had to put it down. Thinks about the boy he was, the ways the crop was used. Memory sets his teeth on edge. He wants to let go the crop, but anger makes him hold it, bone warming to his touch. He thinks about Malcolm, decides not to apologize, the boy will be alright. The lamp flares. The room’s dark walls inhale, draw close around him.

Kincaid goes downstairs to retrieve his brandy from the desk, finds the ice melted, his brandy watered to pale yellow. Condensation has run down the sides of the glass, soaked into the papers, blurred the ink. Somewhere in this mess, the bill for the ice itself.

Lamp in hand, Kincaid leaves the house, walks across the yard and then the pasture, becomes a floating globe of yellow beneath the distant stars. Inside the barn becomes a man again, face lined starkly in ruthless light.

He approaches the Old Man’s saddle resting on its trestle. Leather dark with age, spare lines and light, a good plantation saddle. The Old Man loved it. His son walks wide around it, way you would a snake that might strike you. He squats on his haunches, sets down the lamp, then of a sudden stands, strides forward and brings the crop down hard on the saddle. Hard as he can. Brings it down again and again.

From the house, they can see him out there, open barn doors framing the yellow fury within. His shirt soaked through, whip hand blistered, bleeding. His eyes leak tears.

He knows they watch him. Cecelia, Sithy, Malcolm, the negroes in their cabins. They have never seen him like this. It frightens them.

But Kincaid himself feels lighter, almost at ease. Beating the saddle is an empty act, he knows this, empty as the wind, yet he feels as if he could go on til dawn.

About the author

Amy Jane Lynch writes historical fiction to figure out how we got into this mess and how to behave humanely now that we are. She loves coffee, bicycles, birds and the mountains of North Carolina, where she lives surrounded by trees and circumstance. Age 67, she hopes to become an emerging writer someday.

About the artist

Elmin Marais is a 31-year-old Afrikaaner mom-to-be and an independent artist situated in South Africa. She loves animals, working in the garden, and germinating plants. Her favorite season is autumn, with all the beautiful colors that accompany it.

She has a qualification in Early Childhood Development and is passionate about children and their developmental milestones. However, she has moved on to her other passions which include illustrating short stories, children’s books, and oil painting in general.

View more of her work at her website and her facebook page.