Laurie Sinclair groaned and placed a hand in on the small of her back when she stood up straight and placed the okra she had just picked into her basket. She looked over her land and frowned. What was once acres of cotton and corn fields were now covered with weeds. All she had left now was a small patch of corn, okra, potatoes, and a few tomato plants. She no longer grew cotton; there was no point to it. She was almost all alone now and could not till the land by herself and grow enough and pick enough to sell. What the woman grew now was for her and Moses’s survival.
She would sell most of what she grew in the city, the rest she would store for food for herself. Pickle some okra, store the corn in the bin, and stew and jar some of the tomatoes. The rest she would load on her cart and hitch up the old mule, a mule too old to plow a field any longer, and take to Milledgeville and try to sell. With luck she would make enough money to survive the winter, just barely she knew. She would have to buy feed for the few chickens she had left, chickens that she had rounded up from the woods two years ago; the ones that had escaped the clutches of Sherman’s bummers and then his army.
She knew she would be offered charity from her neighbors and other good Southern Folk when she went into the city of Milledgeville, but she wouldn’t take it. She was never one for charity and she also knew that they didn’t have much and some even less than her. The ones that had more and were well off and had money meant they had been working for and or dealing with the Yankees. Laurie, as most decent folks, would as soon as spit on them before she took as much as a wooden nickel from her former friends and neighbors who had signed their loyalty pledge to the Union.
She hated going into the town, but it was necessary. She hated seeing the Yankee soldiers in their blue uniforms strutting around like peacocks and speaking to the women in a manner no true gentleman would. The rich Yankee carpetbaggers now owning shops that once belonged to good, decent Southerners turned her stomach. The Yankee wives of the carpetbaggers strutted around in expensive but tacky dresses and looked down their noses at the southern woman. Women, who even in their now poverty, were still prideful and were more of a lady than they ever could be.
The former slaves walked around in cheap suits as the Yankee politicians promised them land of their own and jobs if they voted this way or that way; only to give them a handful of Yankee Greenbacks and whiskey, lots of whiskey.
Reconstruction they called it. It was martial law and an occupied army made up of thieves and men who were less than honorable. The only reconstruction that took place was to make the Yankee carpetbaggers rich and make the Southern people suffer as much as possible for losing the War.
Of all their boasting of fighting to free the slaves, the Yankees had little understanding of the black race. Most treated the former slaves no better than the cruel overseers on the plantations they worked. Others were frightened of them. Yankee women refused to hire former mammies, who were gentle and loved by the white children they raised, in fear they would mistreat and some even believed eat their babies.
Well, they’re free now, Laurie thought, even if the Yankees don’t want them they have their freedom if you can call what they still have to endure freedom. She never did like to the idea of owning another person and thought it was morally wrong.
She would argue with her husband at times, a good man by all means, about the wrongs of owning another person. He would tell her that they did not mistreat their slaves, they did not beat their slaves, they didn’t break up families to sell, and they would not tolerate an overseer who took the whip to a slave. Laurie would just remind him, but they are still not free.
While she did feel slavery was immoral, she was no abolitionist. Laurie felt it was a necessary evil. The south was dependent on agriculture and with Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin; cotton had been the main cash crop of the South. The South became economically dependent on slave labor.
Laurie set up a school for the young slave children and taught them to write and read, even though it was against the law. Some attended but most didn’t. Their parents were too afraid of what would happen if someone learned their children could read and write.
Laurie Sinclair knew that while she struggled to just have a meager meal on the table and some days had gone without, she had it better than most. At least she had her home. Still, two years after she could close her eyes and smell and see the smoke of her neighbors’ homes burning as those blue uniformed demons set torch and fire to their once beautiful houses.
Her home was spared, and while not as large as some of the other plantation houses, it was a nice home. Her grandfather had it built when he was young and settled in the area and fought Indians to set claim to what was to become his land.
When the Union Army came through, a Yankee cavalry colonel set up his headquarters in her home. He promised Laurie we would spare her home and land and only take a small number of her livestock and leave her enough crops to be able to survive if she shared his bed. Her bed! The bed she and her husband had shared!
While Laurie Sinclair was a widow, she was not an old woman. She was thirty-six when the Yankees made their way through Georgia. She married at sixteen and had her first child at age seventeen. She was still an attractive woman to who the Yankee colonel took an indecent liking to.
Before the war and before she was married, Laurie Sinclair was considered one of the prettiest girls in three counties. She had several suitors and young men calling on her and asking her father for her hand in marriage. She was a prize for her beauty, her family name, and her land.
Laurie was the only child of her parents to live to adulthood. Her mother had two miscarriages and a son who died of fever when he was three. The man who married Laurie Campbell would marry into a well-respected family and inherit her father’s land, home, and bank account.
Almost the entire county was shocked when Laurie wanted to marry a young man from Louisiana. She rejected proposals from more suitable men to marry her husband.
He had only lived in the county for a few months, was almost penniless, and rumor was he was running from the law In New Orleans for killing a man in a duel. No one, however, could not deny he was extraordinarily handsome, charming, and a gentleman.
At sixteen, Laurie fell in love with him and wanted to marry the man four years older than she was and he felt the same about her. Only a month after they had met, he asked her father for her hand in marriage. Laurie’s father said he would have to think about it, but Laurie knew his answer would be no. That same night, Laurie’s mother asked Laurie if she was pregnant due to the hurry of their wanting to marry.
Laurie told her no she was not, but if that was what it took for her father to give his blessing she would go that night to the man she loved small house. She told her mother she would give herself to him as many times as it took for her to become with child.
Laurie’s mother believed her daughter had truly fallen in love with the young man from Louisiana and told her daughter she would talk to her father. The next day her father gave his blessing and the young couple were married two months later. Laurie did not want to wait that long, but her mother told her that was the shortest time they could plan a wedding that would be appropriate for their family’s social standing in the county.
Even now, two years after the War ended, at age thirty-eight, Laurie was still an attractive woman even if the hardships of the war and the even worse hardships after the war took their toll on her.
Her face and arms no longer held the complexion of alabaster skin prized by Southern women who worked hard to keep the sun off their pampered flesh. Now, after two years of working her small patch of land, the sun had at first burned her pale skin at places the rays of the sun could reach and then tanned it. Her hands were no longer soft and delicate, but calloused from her work to scratch out just enough to survive. She had lost a great deal of weight since the War started. Her long red hair was more wild looking without all the brushes, combs, ribbons, bobby pins, and styling she once had time for. Still, Laurie Sinclair was considered a very attractive woman who men desired for honorable and non-honorable purposes.
Laurie had spit in the Yankee General’s face when he made her the offer. A week later he and his troops were on the march again. They burned her barn, her fields, took her livestock, horses, and left her only with an old mule. They killed her chickens and pigs for food and stole all her jewelry and valuables she had hidden away before they arrived. The Yankee bummers were like hogs rooting out truffles when it came to searching for valuables. They didn’t find her husband’s shotgun or her father’s Colt Pistol at least nor the twelve twenty-dollar gold pieces her husband had left her before he went to war. They spared her house, however, but not out of any type of kindness.
“Don’t torch the house, boys,” The colonel had ordered his men. “She was so willing to please me when she shared my bed,” he told his men with a laugh. “I hadn’t had that much fun or had a woman do things to me she did since the brothel in Atlanta.”
“Damn liar!” Laurie shouted back at him as his men laughed at her. If she had her husband’s shotgun in her hands she would have shot the Yankee officer dead right then.
Laurie had lost her husband and both her sons to the War. Her husband died at the prison camp Camp Douglas in far-off Chicago after he was wounded and taken prisoner at the Battle of Sharpsburg, called Antietam by the Northern papers. Her oldest son was killed at Gettysburg; he was twenty years old. Her youngest son was only fourteen when he died at the Battle of Griswoldville, only thirty miles from the home he was born and raised in.
The fourteen-year-old boy had run away from home to join up when word went out that General Pleasant Jackson Philip was raising a militia to stop a regiment of Sherman’s army from taking the important industrial town of Griswoldville and then move on to Macon. Battle? It was more of a massacre. The Confederate Militia was made up of old men and young boys who faced a battle-experienced Yankee regiment, most armed with the new repeating Spencer Rifle. Reportedly being drunk, General Philp ordered his troops to charge a fortified Yankee position.
The Confederate Militia suffered over six hundred dead and twice as many wounded or captured; the Yankees only had thirteen dead and less than fifty wounded. A local newspaper in Macon named it “A Harvest of Death.” It was reported by some confederate survivors that as the militia closed on the Yankee line, seeing that they were facing young boys and old men and the death toll they were inflicted, Union soldiers stop firing and started shouting to the oncoming enemy to stop and flee the battlefield. The brave men and boys of the Confederate Militia kept coming and the Union soldiers had no choice but to start killing again.
Laurie took Moses and Della, a strikingly beautiful house slave whose father was African and her mother was a Cherokee Indian, with her to Macon to claim the body of her youngest and bought him home. The graves of her oldest and her husband were just tombstones over empty graves.
Many women in the area had lost sons and husbands to the War, but Laurie was considered a hero and respected for the sacrifice of losing her husband and both sons for the Cause. Laurie damned the Cause and wanted her family back.
The woman had cried when her husband and sons went to war, but that was the last time anyone had seen her shed a tear She cried in her bed alone for months after the death of her husband and then her sons, but she would be damned if anyone saw her mourn. That was until the day the Yankees burned her out and took all she had.
The one cow she had, a skinny thing, she was lucky to have, would need hay. The cow was a blessing and she was lucky to have it. Big Mose said he had found it that spring in the woods. Laurie suspected he stole it, but she didn’t care. It was a Godsend and if he stole it from one of the Yankee carpetbagger families that had stolen her former neighbor’s land then all the better. Laurie turned her head when she heard the voice of a man cursing.
“Moses, you know I don’t tolerate that kind of talk,” she chastised the man but had a smile on her lips.
“I’m sorry, Misses. Sinclair,” the man replied and held up a shovel that was now in two pieces. “Broke the shovel handle digging up them taters, ma’am.”
“Well, it was bound to happen as old as that thing is. We’ll get another one from town,” she assured the man.
“We ain’t got the money for a new one, Mrs. Sinclair,” the man answered.
“We’ll make do, Moses, we’ll make do,” she told him.
Laurie looked over Moses or as most called the man, Big Mose. Laurie always called him by his given name and always had. He was called Big Mose for a reason. The man was the biggest man Laurie had ever seen. Moses was a young man, only twenty-two, or maybe twenty-three. Laurie could not rightly remember the year he was born even though she had been there helping his mother when she gave birth.
Both his parents were long dead. His mother died of fever from childbirth and his father died when Moses was three from several bites by a cottonmouth snake.
Moses was a giant of a man who stood about six foot six or six foot seven inches tall. He was a powerfully built man with huge arms and legs, his body so broad he could just barely fit through a normal-sized doorway. Whatever weight he once had in his belly had disappeared, just as Laurie had gotten much thinner, from lack of hearty meals over the past three years.
While Laurie had lost weight and even muscle tone, Moses worked hard and his arms were still heavy with muscles. The young man’s skin was as black as coal and he kept his hair cropped close to his head.
Moses was born a slave, born on the Sinclair Plantation. Now he was a free man, the War saw to that. While the other slaves had run off to follow that Devil Sherman’s army as he burned and pillaged his way through Georgia or left to seek their fortune elsewhere, Moses had stayed.
It was five days after the Yankees had left and Laurie found Moses working on rebuilding the storage building close to the main house. Laurie walked over to him and handed him a white cloth poke.
“I’m sorry, Moses, but this is all the food I can spare,” she had told him as he took the sack. “It’s not much, and for that I am sorry.” She then pressed two of her twenty-dollar gold pieces into the man’s large hand. “You hide these, Moses, don’t let anyone see you with them or they’ll kill you for sure. Spend them only when you need to.”
The big young black man took the sack and looked at her curiously, not understanding.
“Moses, you’re free,” Laurie had told the young black man. “You are free to go where you want now. You don’t have to stay.”
“Misses Sinclair, I reckon if I am free to go where I want then I want to stay here,” he had told the woman. “This is the only home I’d known and seems to me you are going to need some help.”
“It’ll be hard going, Moses,” Laurie told him trying to hold back tears.
“Yes’em, I spect it will be and that’s why you need me and that’s why I need you,” he answered her.
Laurie threw herself into the big man’s body and hugged his large, thick body as buried her head in his chest and cried. Moses did not lift his large arms to hug her back.
“Ma’am, you best not be hugging me,” he told her. “If some white man came along they would hang me and tar and feather you.”
Laurie rose on her tiptoes, stretched her arms as far as she could, put her hands on each side of the young man’s head, and had to pull him down for her head to reach his because he was over a foot taller than she was. She kissed the young man’s whiskered stubble cheek.
“I’m not going to let no man hurt you, Moses, you have my promise on that,” she told him and felt a sudden deep affection for the large black man.
“And I ain’t gonna let no one hurt you either, Misses Sinclair. You got my word on that,” the man assured her and then hugged her back as she once again buried her face into his chest and cried.
Laurie cried in the man’s large arms for a long time. It was the first time she cried in a long time. She cried for her husband, for her two sons, for all she lost, and for Moses staying with her.
She stepped back and Moses unwrapped his arms from her. Laurie wiped her eyes with her dirty hands and looked up at the man’s face. She took a deep breath.
“Well, we best get started,” she had told him. “We best finish building you a place to sleep.”
Moses grinned. “Yes, Misses Sinclair. I figure this here shed cause it’s closer to the house than the slave quarters. Where we is gonna get the wood and nails I don’t know.”
“We’ll make do, Moses, we’ll make do,” she smiled up at the man. “And it’s Laurie now, not Mrs. Sinclair.”
“Well, ma’am, that just won’t be proper,” he told the woman.
They were able to scavenge enough wood and nails to build the shack well enough for the man to sleep in, using mostly the planks and nails taken off the main house. Both knew it would be too dangerous for them if Moses moved into the main home. Almost three years later, Moses still referred to Laurie as “Misses Sinclair”.
Four days after Moses’s shovel broke, the two had filled the small wagon Moses had built from materials and an old broken wagon he had gotten somewhere, Laurie knew better than to ask from where, with enough vegetables to take into town and sell. They covered the wagon and placed it in the rebuilt barn to keep the raccoons, and other scavenger animals away from it.
Laurie watched as Moses expertly skinned and filleted some catfish he had caught earlier that day. The man handled a knife better than a surgeon did a scalpel.
They enjoyed a meager meal of catfish, fried green tomatoes, okra cooked in fatback, using the last of the cornmeal, and grits outside on the porch. It was a nice evening and Moses still refused to set foot into the house after the sun started to set.
He always told Laurie it was not proper for a man, especially a black man, to be in the home of a white woman who was a true lady as she was after dark. He didn’t take to coming in during the day unless Laurie set her foot down and made him when she needed something fixed inside the house, which was often as of late.
Laurie knew many white so-called gentlemen who were not as gentlemanly as this former uneducated slave. He was learning however, Laurie had taken time to teach the young man how to read and write. Making sure they set aside time away from their chores for lessons. Moses was a quick and eager learner.
“Well, Moses,” Laurie said as she stood up. “We best get to sleep early tonight. We have a long day ahead of us.”
”I don’t know how many trips that ole mule got left pulling that wagon, Misses Sinclair,” Moses told her wiping his hands on his dirty pants.
“We’ll make do, Moses, We’ll make do,” she answered with a smile and gathered up the chipped plates.
“Sure wish I had me some tobaccy to smoke after a meal in that fine pipe you gave me,” Moses commented as he stood up.
Laurie had given Moses her grandfather’s ornate pipe the previous year as a Christmas present. She wished she could have given him more. The year before she had given him her husband’s razor with the ivory handle, two things she had hidden with the shotgun and pistol the Yankees didn’t find. He refused at first, telling her she could get a fair price in town for them. Laurie told him she could not bear to sell them and they belonged in the family and she and Moses were the only family they had left now.
“Maybe we can buy you some good smoking tobacco tomorrow,” She told him with a smile.
“Now don’t you go wasting any money you may get on me, Misses Sinclair, ya hear,” he told her. “Rabbit baccy is just fine for the likes of me. You got taxes you gots to pay soon.”
Laurie placed a hand on the young man’s strong arm and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You let me worry about that, Moses.”
“You know, Misses Sinclair, if you would just sell to them Yankee women and them soldiers you could make an extra dollar or two when we go to town,” Moses told her.
Laurie snorted disgust, “I’d rather starve than sell to them and I’ll hear no more talk of it.”
Moses smiled. “Yes, Ma’am.” He knew Laurie Sinclair was a stubborn and willful woman and he respected her for it.
“We best retire now, Moses, we have to be up early and I need a bath,” Laurie told the young man. “You best bathe also. I can smell you from here,” she teased him.
“Yes, ma’am,” the young man said, not realizing the woman was teasing him. “Night, Misses Sinclair,” Moses told her and walked to his one-room cabin.
Laurie lay in the metal rub in her kitchen that she had filled with hot and cold water. After she had washed, Laurie relaxed in the tub. She enjoyed this time when she could be clean and relax until the water began to chill. She closed her eyes and thought of better days.
Laurie thought of the days before the War, of her two sons, and her husband. The simple things. Family meals, her husband teaching her sons how to be good Southern men, the social events they attended together, her oldest son courting the pretty Savannah Trelawney girl, and as always her thoughts turned to the intimate moments she shared with her husband.
She enjoyed and hated thinking of those times. Laurie enjoyed the thoughts of her and her husband kissing, the flirty banter between them, the way her husband touched her body and how she touched his, and of them making love. What she hated about it was how it would make her feel.
Laurie had not felt a man’s touch on her body in over five years when her husband had come home from the war on furlough, only a few months before he was taken prisoner at Antietam. That was the last time a man had even kissed her. Laurie had kissed several of her suiters before she was married but her husband was the only man she had ever made love to. The only man she ever needed. Thoughts of her husband aroused her and she hated that feeling, knowing it could not be satisfied.
It was not that men did not find Laurie desirable, she knew they did. She had men years younger than her wanting to court her or at least just be in her bed for a night or two. The men who were too old to fight in the war or were too young when the war started. Younger men who were veterans and even the men who were cowards who instead of fighting for the Cause stayed home and joined the Home Guard. There were some Yankee officers in town and she had heard the crude comments from Yankee soldiers as she walked by them when in town. Laurie would sooner burn in hell than allow a Yankee to so much as hold her hand.
Laurie lay in the tub and was thinking of her honeymoon with her husband when she was sixteen and how he took her virginity. She was nervous that night and even afraid but he was gentle and loving. After the first time and they had both orgasmed, he asked her if she was okay and hoped he did not hurt her. Laurie had smiled at him and asked how long before they could make love again. Her husband laughed and told her he could go again right then. He did and they made love many times that night and the nights after.
She thought of their sixth night together in the suite of their ship that was to take them on their Grand Tour Honeymoon in Europe. How she waited with anticipation naked in the bed for her husband to join her. How she felt the strong need for him to be inside her. When he joined her in bed, naked as she was, he kissed her passionately and his fingers found her light brown nipples, which were painfully erect from arousal. How he kissed his way down her body and paused to suck her nipples. How she begged him to enter her, almost in tears from the need to have him inside her, but he didn’t.
He continued to kiss down her stomach and placed his head between her legs. Laurie suddenly became frightened and her thighs closed tight over her husband’s head. He gently spread her legs apart and placed his mouth over her sex. She had not even heard of such a thing but she could not deny the pleasure it gave her. She cried out in pleasure when his finger found the small nub just above her sex and he started to tickle it.
His tongue entered her sex and her husband tasted her as his finger teased the pleasure nub. Laurie placed her hands on his head and pushed him into her, trying to force his tongue deeper into her sex. Her husband then took his mouth off of her and placed it over the top of her womanhood and his tongue started flicking over the nub, again she cried out in pleasure.
He placed one finger and then two inside her; they slipped in easily due to the wetness between her legs. Again Laurie begged her husband to enter her and make love to her, but he didn’t. Instead, his fingers touched another spot, this one inside her sex and Laurie’s back arched and she cried out louder in ecstasy. Her husband massaged the spot inside her while his tongue teased her little nub and soon she screamed out as she orgasmed. She had never felt such pleasure in her life.
She cried out so loudly that later that night she asked her husband if he thought the people in the next cabin may have heard her. He teased her and told her he didn’t think so because if they had the ship’s captain and some of his crew would have knocked down the door to the cabin thinking she was being murdered.
“Where did you learn how to do that?” she asked her husband after her orgasm ended and she caught her breath.
“I’m from Louisiana, Sha, we know all types of tricks on how to please a woman down in N’Awlins,” he told her in a fake Cajun accent.
Laurie giggled and kissed her husband on the lips, the same lips that had been on her sex. “Do it again,” she told him and he did.
After her second orgasm from his mouth and fingers, her husband got on top of her and entered her, and quickly brought Laurie to another orgasm with their lovemaking.
Larue felt her sex become wet and her nipples taunt as she thought of the man she was married to. She thought she could even touch herself to get a blissful relief. She had heard that women do that to themselves and knew men did. But she didn’t. A proper lady did not do such things.
Laurie suddenly became alert and stood up in the tub when she heard the sound of dogs barking and men shouting. She quickly got out of the tub and slipped on her white linen chemise and ran into the den of her home. She grabbed the shotgun from over the mantle, checked to make sure it was loaded, slipped a dirty white haversack over her shoulder, and ran outside. The shouts and dogs barking were coming from Moses’s cabin.
Laurie ran barefoot down the red clay road toward the man’s dwelling. As she ran she heard a man scream and knew it was Moses. He screamed three more times before she got close enough to see what was happening. She suddenly stopped when she got close to Moses’s cabin and saw the scene. It was a clear sky and the moon was in its waxing gibbous stage and the men on horseback carried torches so she could see clearly.
There were twelve men, six on horseback holding torches and either a rifle, shotgun or pistol in their other hands. One of the dismounted men was holding the reins of his horse and the horse of the other dismounted men. Two men were standing around a large oak tree, one of them groaning in pain and clutching his right arm. Laurie could tell by the way it was bent that it had been broken. He was cussing and yelling about how he was going to hurt someone really bad for breaking his arm before they hung him. Another was standing back holding two large hound dogs by their leashes.
The dogs were barking and growling at the tree. A man was throwing a robe over a large limb of the oak; one end of the robe was fashioned into a noose. Tied to the tree trunk was Moses and the last man was standing behind Moses with a whip in his hand. Laurie heard a crack of a whip and Moses cried out again. All the men were wearing white hoods on their heads. Moses was shirtless and Laurie could see his back was already bloody from the whip.
Laurie knew what they were even with their hooded heads, most decent southern people did. Night Riders! Southern men who sought out vigilante justice for wrongs committed against decent southern people. The Yankee law did very little to prevent crimes against the southerners and would only seek justice when crimes were committed against their own. They sometimes interrogated people about who the Night Riders were, but decent folk would never tell.
She also knew who most of them were. Most she knew since they were children together. Some had courted her and she had flirted with and danced with at balls and she had even shared a few kisses with one or two of them before her husband had won her heart.
Twelve against one were poor odds, Laurie knew that. She also knew that these men would not harm her. The ones she knew were or used to be good southern men before the War and they would never harm a lady, especially if that lady was Laurie Sinclair. Even before the War, Laurie was known as a true lady of high repute with an impeccable reputation. Laurie knew they would try and grab her and restrain her and then go about their business, but not hurt her.
She also knew they would be wary of her as well. They knew Laurie Sinclair was not a woman to be trifled with and she would not hesitate to use that shotgun she held in her hands to protect what was hers.
Laurie fired both barrels of her shotgun into the air and quickly reached into the haversack for two more shells and reloaded. She knew how to shoot and shoot well. Her father had taught her to hunt and shoot since she was eight, much to the dismay of her mother. Her mother told them it was unladylike for a young woman to hunt and shoot. Laurie loved it however and ladylike be damned. She enjoyed the times she spent with her father. All of the men turned and looked at her after she fired the shots into the air. One pointed his rifle at her.
“Put that rifle down, you damn fool!” One man on horseback yelled and pushed the barrel of the rifle down to point to the ground. He turned his hooded head toward Laurie. “Now, Miss. Laurie, you just go back in the house and let us attend to our business,” he told her in a condescending tone.
“It’s Mrs. Sinclair, James Pettis. Yes, I know you and I know you also Frank Kennedy and you to William Davis,” Laurie yelled back. She turned her head to the man holding the dogs, which were now barking and growling at her. “You turn that leash loose, Brett Hamilton, and I swear by hell’s fire you and your dogs all will get a belly full of buckshot!” She stared at the man. “You’re the damn sheriff of this county so best tell me right now what’s going on here.”
It was James Pettis that answered. The Pettis family once owned the wealthiest and largest plantation in the surrounding counties and owned a lumber mill. The War put an end to his plantation when the Yankees burned it down, but he had rebuilt the lumber mill. James was a man of high influence. He had served in the War as a colonel and raised troops to join Robert Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Laurie’s husband and her oldest had been two who joined him, her husband was elected a captain by the men. The War had put an end to their wealth but not his influence. Too many James Pettis had disgraced his family’s honor after the war by dealing with the Yankee carpetbaggers, but the man still had influence and in his dealings was re-establishing his family’s wealth. Lumber was in high demand now.
“Miss, Lau…Mrs. Sinclair,” Pettis corrected himself, “we’re for justice and a woman’s honor and we aim to carry it out. It’s best you go back inside your house. Ladies such as you don’t need to see this.”
“Justice? What justice?” Laurie shouted out and turned her head to the man she identified as William Davis. “And you, Bill Davis, what do you know of honor? Both my boys and my husband died for the precious Cause, but you, you were too much a coward to join up. You stayed home with the Home Guard.”
“Now, you see here, Laurie,” Davis said to defend himself, “some of us needed to stay behind and protect our women’s honor and what was ours just as much as those who went to fight.”
Laurie laughed and it was a spiteful laugh. “A woman’s honor? You? How many times did you come around to steal from me and the other people in the county? Stole our chickens and hogs and horses and what crops we managed to harvest. How many times did you suggest you could comfort me since my husband was gone? Maybe I should tell your wife about your honor towards women? You were worse than those Yankee bummers. You were worse because you knew us, you been into our homes as a guest, and once called us friends”
“I only did what I was ordered,” he shouted back. “I took what I had to for supplies for our troops and I never made such advances toward you.”
“Yes you took what was required for our brave men and that I was willing to give,” Laurie replied. “But you took more than what was needed to feed your fat belly. Why don’t you tell your hooded friends here what you did the last time you came to collect and I refused to allow you to take me to my bed? My eye was swollen for a week. But I didn’t say a word to anyone, now, did I? Instead I told you if you ever came back around I would put a bullet in your fat gut with my father’s pistol.” Laurie cocked both barrels of her shotgun. “Well you’re back now,” she told him threateningly.
“I never did such a thing…”
“Shut up, Bill!” James Pettis interrupted the man. “We aren’t here to discuss old grievances, we’re here for justice.”
“Justice for who?” Laurie asked. “Who’s honor and just why don’t you tell me what’s going on here.”
“Melanie Flannigan,” Sherriff Hamilton answered. “She was beaten and taken advantage of this afternoon.”
“Then why aren’t y’all down at Shanty Town? If anyone did it, it would be one of those scum,” Laurie reminded them.
Shanty Town was a makeshift town of shacks and hovels occupied by former slaves and veterans from both sides who were not good men even before the War. They were known to rob people on the roads and assault women. There were even former female slaves and white women of low class applying the trade of prostitution there if any man was stupid enough to go to Shanty Town for such things, and there were.
“Because her father told us it was Big Mose who did it,” Pettis answered.
Laurie gave another spiteful laugh. “More likely it was her pa who gave her the beaten after he caught her in the woodshed with some man. We all know about Melly Flannigan,” Laurie told them. “Some of you all too well, I suspect. Her pa just needed someone to blame for her bruises and if she came up having a baby nine months later.” She looked over the men. “Moses was with me all day working the fields and getting the cart ready to take to town tomorrow. He couldn’t have done it.”
“You swear on your word about that, Mrs. Sinclair?” James Pettis asked.
“Hand me a Bible and I’ll swear on it,” she told him.
“Cut him loose, boys,” James told his men.
“But we got him, Mr. Pettis,” the hooded man that had pointed the rifle at Laurie protested. His voice sounded that of a young man or even younger. “Of course, she’s gonna lie for him.” Laurie heard the young man chuckle under the hood. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this here boy shared her bed since she ain’t had no man about for years now.”
Laurie raised her shotgun to the boy and came close to pulling the trigger from one barrel, but before she could James Pettis punched the boy in the face. There was a crunching sound of his nose being broken and he fell off his horse.
“You ever say anything like that about Mrs. Sinclair, boy, and it won’t be her shotgun you got to worry about, but my pistol,” he told the young man and turned back to Laurie. “No need to be swearing on the Bible, Mrs. Sinclair, most of us know your word is truth.”
Laurie nodded and lowered her shotgun. James Pettis may have lowered his reputation for dealing with the Yankees but he was still a gentleman who always held her and her husband in high regard. The boy got off the ground and the front of his white hood was red with the blood from his broken nose.
The Night Riders cut Moses loose and he fell to his knees. Laurie waited until the men rode off and ran to the large black man. She leaned her shotgun against the tree and got to her knees.
“Moses, can you walk?” she asked.
“Yes’em they didn’t whip me too much,” he told her.
He stood up and his knees shook and he almost stumbled but placed a hand on the tree to prevent himself from falling. Moses was a big and strong man and the men only laid about four or five lashes of the whip on his back, but being whipped by a bullwhip even once would any man to his knees.
“Lean on me, Moses,” she told him. “As much as you need to without knocking me over with you.”
Moses looked at Laurie and quickly diverted his eyes. “Misses Sinclair, You best go into the house and put something decent on. I can manage back to my cabin.”
Laurie looked down at herself and blushed. All she was wearing was her white, linen chemise and it was wet and clinging to her body. Anyone looking at her could see right through the wet, clingy material. It exposed her breasts and light brown nipples and the red hair around her sex. Maybe the men that were looking at her weren’t focused on the shotgun she was holding after all, she thought.
“Well don’t look or look, I don’t care,” Laurie told Moses. “We have to get you inside and clean those wounds. You won’t be any use to me laid up with an infection and don’t you think I am wasting the few gold pieces I have left on a doctor for you? That’s for taxes if we need it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Moses said but he smiled despite the pain. He knew Mrs. Sinclair would not hesitate to call a doctor for him if one was to be needed.
The woman had already spent most of the gold coins her husband left her. The majority went to the first year’s taxes after the war ended. Yankee tax accessors that had taken over raised the taxes on the landowners to unaffordable amounts. Then the carpetbaggers would come in and pay the taxes and lay claim to the land. It was thievery but nothing could be done about it and many a southerner lost land and homes that had been in their family for generations.
She spent more of them the first year after the war. It was a hard year and she needed to replace things the Yankees had stolen or destroyed. She thought about buying a horse, but all the good horses were long gone. Either given or taken for the Cause by the Home Guard or stolen by the Yankees. What horses that were left for sale weren’t worth the price they were asking.
She thought maybe after this year if she didn’t need to spend what little coins she had left she would buy a horse from Agnes Trelawney or another mule to replace Ole Tom. She knew if she would ask, the older Trelawney woman would give her a fine horse, but Laurie wasn’t going to take charity.
Laurie picked up her shotgun, unloaded it, and handed it to Moses. “Use this if need be to help you walk.”
Leaning on both her and the shotgun, Moses let the woman lead him up the red clay road.
“Misses Sinclair, we done past my cabin,” Moses told her.
“I’m taking you to the house, Moses. You need care and your cabin is no place to take care of you,” she told the man.
Moses stopped. “No, ma’am, my cabin is just fine. You don’t need to be car ‘in for me.”
“By hells fire, Moses! I swear to the devil himself if you don’t get moving and go into my house I’ll go to the barn and get the buggy whip and finish what those men started!” Laurie yelled at the man.
Again Moses smiled. He knew she would do no such thing, but he moved toward the house anyway. The large black man knew that when her temper was up and she used her favorite cursing phrase she picked up from her pa, Laurie Sinclair meant business.
“Yes, ma’am,” was all he said.
Laurie led the man into the house and to the kitchen. She told Moses to sit down on a stool while she went to go change her clothes.
Laurie walked upstairs to her bedroom and removed the damp chemise and slipped on her plain, brown dress. She only had three dresses left and all were plain. Two were more worn out than the third that she wore when she went to town. She did not put on any undergarments. Like her dresses, she only had a few and only one corset left that she never wore anymore.
When the Yankees had come and burned and looted her property, they made a spectacle of burning her fancy dresses and undergarments. Her husband’s and son’s clothes they took for themselves for their scouts. Hats, dresses, shoes, and boots that she once wore to social events, parties, and balls were all burned.
The Yankee soldiers laughed and taunted her as they threw her bodices, corsets, petticoats, stockings, her more ornate chemises, and dresses and crinolines into a pile and burned them. They then added her footwear to the fire. The clothes they left her were the three plain dresses, two white chemises, and the ankle-high black shoes she had been wearing that day. The shoes had been long since worn out and resoled several times Laurie finally had to buy a new pair.
A Yankee sergeant put corsets on her youngest son’s two hunting dogs, tied a rope around their necks, and paraded them around; calling them Southern Belle bitches. When one of the dogs bit the sergeant, he dragged them to an oak tree and hung them. Several Yankee soldiers then took target practice on the poor animals until they were riddled with bullets. They left the dogs hanging on the tree and after they left, Laurie cut them down and buried them next to the grave of her youngest son. The boy had loved those dogs.
It no longer mattered to her that she lost her fancy clothes. There would be no more barbeques, parties, dances, or balls to attend. Before the War Laurie would never have been caught dead wearing the same dress in one month, but now it was a matter of pride to be seen wearing the same dress every time they went to town for most decent women. It was a matter of pride to show the Yankees that they could not be defeated and how much they were willing to suffer for the Cause.
Once dressed more appropriately, Laurie went back into the kitchen and washed and dressed Moses’s wounds. She cut and ripped one of her few remaining bed sheets for bandages.
“They’re not as bad as I first feared,” Laurie told him as she stood behind Moses and washed his back.
As she cleaned his wounds she realized this was the first time she had seen the large black man without a shirt on since he became a man. The muscles on his back were well-defined from years of hard work and labor. Laurie knew Moses was big and muscular, which was hard not to notice even when he was fully dressed, but she never realized how defined the muscles of his body were.
As she washed his back, her hands ran over the back of the man’s body in a manner that was not appropriate and had nothing to do with cleaning his wounds. She felt her nipples become erect and she felt the wetness between her legs.
Laurie moved her head closer to Moses’s body and inhaled. She could smell the blood from his whip marks but also his masculine scent; sweat and a musky odor. Moses had yet to wash after the hard work in the hot humid Georgia day before the Night Riders took him out of his cabin. His scent was pungent. She closed her eyes to enjoy it. It had been a long time since she smelled a man that close to her.
“…and when tomorrow when we go to town,” Moses had been talking and Laurie did not even notice what the man was saying. “Misses, Sinclair, you hear me?”
His question snapped her out of her thoughts and she blushed and felt ashamed of herself and how her body reacted.
“I…I need to get some liniment oil to help with the pain before I bandage them. Tomorrow I’ll go see if I can find some devil’s walking stick to help so you won’t get an infection,” Laurie said.
The slave Della had taught Laurie about what plants, weeds, and other natural remedies were good for medical use, would bring a good night’s sleep, calm the nerves, etc. Most of the other slaves were afraid of Della, thinking she was a witch. Laurie’s mother held the woman in high respect, however, and told her to teach her daughter the use of natural remedies. Laurie liked Della and respected her a great deal and would pay rapt attention to the woman’s teachings.
When Laurie walked back into the kitchen, Moses had turned around on the stool and was facing her. The woman paused and bit her lower lip when she saw the front of the black man’s chest. His skin was dark and glistening from sweat. His chest was covered with coarse black hair, and his large chest was muscular as his back. Laurie stared for a few seconds as Moses was looking at his feet. She then looked at the younger man’s face and thought he was very handsome even though he was a black man. Again Laurie felt her nipples become taut and a desire between her legs and also shame in herself for Moses making her feel that way.
“You feelin well, Misses Sinclair?” Moses asked and brought Laurie out of her trance.
“Of course,” she said with a slight tone of anger in her voice. “I’m just worried about you is all and how I am going to have to go to town by myself tomorrow.”
“No, ma’am, I can’t allow that. There be ruffians on the road and seeing a woman alone they may do something,” Moses told her.
Laurie laughed as she walked closer to the man. “And just what do you think you could do about it in your condition, pray tell? You are staying here tomorrow and resting and healing. I’ll carry the pistol.”
“Them Yankees will arrest you for carrying that if they find it,” Moses reminded her.
“Hell’s fire, Moses!” Laurie shouted at the man. “Do you have to argue with me about everything? Now turn around and let me put this liniment on you.”
Moses chuckled at the woman’s temper as he turned around on the stool. Her temper could be as fiery as her red hair. He felt sorry for the man she would end up remarrying if she ever did. The only man Moses had ever seen who could tame her was her husband. There were plenty of men in the county that would marry the woman, but she showed no interest in any of them.
“It’s barely bleeding now,” she told the man as she examined his back. “Not deep as I thought. Must have been that Burr Reynolds who did the whipping, he always was a clumsy fool and weak as a kitten. You’re lucky it wasn’t the sheriff. My husband once told me he saw that man peel the skin off a runaway with a whip like a surgeon with a scalpel. This is going to hurt.”
Moses winced as Laurie applied liniment oil to his wounds.
“Did you break that one man’s arm, Moses?” she asked as she administered to his wounds.
“Yes’em,” he answered.
“You’re lucky they didn’t just shoot you right then,” she scolded him.
“They weren’t going kill me fast,” he told her. “They wanted to kill me slow and make it hurt.”
“I’m sorry, Moses,” Laurie told him.
Moses could hear the sound of emotion in her voice and thought the woman was close to crying, something rare for her.
“Weren’t your fault, Misses Sinclair,” he assured her.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect you,” she told him. “I’m sorry I broke my promise to you.”
“Ma’am, don’t you fret about that. Wasn’t anything you could’ve done,” he told her in a reassuring voice.
Moses heard the woman sniffle a few times but didn’t turn around. He knew she did not want him to see her cry.
“No, there wasn’t and that’s your fault,” she chastised him moments later. “If you would have moved into this house when I told you last year they wouldn’t come and got you. From now on you live in here, Moses, and I won’t hear another word of it.”
Moses smiled again, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Why did you lie to them?” Moses asked after a short period of silence. “You told them I was with you all day but I wasn’t. I went down to the lake fishing for hours for them catfish we had for supper.”
“Because if I didn’t they would whip you more and hang you, Moses,” she told him. “Plus I knew you didn’t do what they accused you of. You would never do that.”
“You know what they are going to do, Misses Sinclair. Those men wanted blood tonight and it doesn’t matter whose it is as long as it’s a black man’s blood. They gonna lynch some innocent man.”
“I know it,” Laurie told him. “But that’s not my problem. They aren’t going to harm me or mine and that’s all I care about.”
Moses nodded. Laurie was no longer the carefree, vivacious, sweet-natured woman she had once been. What she suffered due to the War had changed her.
Once Laurie had tended and bandaged the man’s wounds she led him to the small room off the kitchen where Della had once lived. The bed was almost too small for Moses and she told him when he had healed up some they would move one of her son’s larger beds into the room. Once Moses was settled in, Laurie emptied the bathtub and went upstairs to her room to go to bed.
She took off her dress and put on her summer sleeping gown made of thin white cotton. She had two sleeping gowns, the cotton summer one and a thicker flannel one. She brushed her tangled, long red hair, and tied it into a ponytail behind her head with a green ribbon. Laurie was exhausted from the day’s work and the other events of that night and fell asleep quickly. She dreamed; a dream that she had more often over the last months. She dreamed of her husband.
He lay on top of her and they were both naked. Her husband kissed her while fingers from one hand caressed her erect nipples and fingers of his other hand were inside her wet sex. Both hands were giving her such pleasure. Laurie begged her husband to enter her and when he did she cried out in blissful ecstasy. She clutched his back as he made love to her.
His lovemaking was slow and gentle as he kissed her neck and felt wonderful. Laurie closed her eyes and enjoyed the intimate passion of their lovemaking. Soon her husband’s thrusts inside her quickened and became stronger and she cried out from the pleasure of it. Her husband started going faster and his thrust became more powerful and Laurie could feel a change in their lovemaking.
It was no longer filled with intimacy and passion but was more lustful and somehow seemed immoral and no longer became lovemaking but more animalistic. She opened her eyes.
Her husband’s body was much larger and no longer white, but black. Her husband’s face was no longer his but had turned into Moses’s face. The large black man was not lying on top of her as her husband had been, but he was kneeling between her spread legs. He had his large, black hands under her buttocks, and her legs were draped over his upper thighs. Moses’s manhood was just barely touching the outside of her wet sex.
“I’m gonna fuck you now, Laurie,” the black man told her. His voice sounded almost beast-like and filled with lust.
Laurie didn’t even flinch at the crude word but instead looked into Moses’s brown eyes. There was no look of love in his eyes. They were filled with lustful desire for the older white woman. He looked bestial but handsome.
“Yes, Moses, please, please fuck me. It’s been so long,” she begged the young black man.
Moses then did as she begged him to do. Laurie cried loudly out to God when the man entered her in one, powerful thrust of his hips and he started to fuck her. He fucked her hard and fast. Laurie put her hands above her head. So powerfully hard were the man’s thrusts into her that she had to grip the headboard of her bed to prevent her head from slamming into it.
Laurie made loud, moaning cries of pleasure with each hard thrust into her sex and called out to God repeatedly as the black man fucked her. Soon she felt her orgasm building and she begged Moses to go even harder and faster. Laurie lowered one hand to her chest and she started to pinch her nipples as Moses started fucking her even harder.
“Oh, my God! Yes….yes…Oh, God yes, Moses!” Laurie cried out in her dream as her orgasm was about to hit her and bring that wonderful release.
Laurie woke from her sleep and dream suddenly. Her body was covered in perspiration, her nipples painfully erect, her pleasure nub that her husband used to tease expertly throbbed, and her sex was wet and seemed to ache, not from pain but from the need to be filled.
“Oh, God,” she cried out aloud in shame. She had never dreamed of another man before, besides her husband. To dream of another man as she did made her feel ashamed of herself and worse it was Moses, a young black man.
