Jo and Lorie were a stark contrast to everything around them, it seemed, and before Meg was given any explanation, she understood. They looked a little wild, as though they’d raced around the property, collecting the pot, Lorie’s cart, and a blanket to cushion the back for her family. They hadn’t danced—Meg knew because she would have seen them—but without music or memorized steps, they stood as close now as she’d gotten to Wisdom Carter, and they looked as though they’d done so since well before tonight. They couldn’t have because Jo would never be the type to hide a boy from her sisters—and she’d never shown an interest in hiding one at all.
While they bundled her mother and sisters onto the cart, and then when Lorie helped her up, too, Meg accepted something she’d worried over before: It was better to be adventurous and passionate than it was to be measured or smart. Jo was most of those things anyway. She wasn’t measured, but she was the rest, while Meg was only dreadfully boring. It wasn’t any wonder that neither Carter brother had ever taken notice of her until she’d worn a dress Beth had improved, and let her mother style her hair. She tried to keep her hair as still and tidy as the missionary teachers much of the time, and often beneath a straw bonnet, despite that it made her look older than she was. Stodgier, at the very least.
The cart jostled her, but neither the bumpy ride nor her sister’s free-flowing laugh from the front seat could rearrange her thoughts tonight.
There was a reason Joseph Williams hadn’t written poetry or embroidered his envelopes with care and calligraphy.
Meg March would make a good wife and mother, but she was not the kind of girl who sparked a man’s imagination. She’d never made someone laugh the way Jo did right now.
When a tear slid down one cheek, she pinned her chin to the side so only the darkness outside the cart could see.
VIII
After the reception, Jo took to accompanying Beth and Amy across the sound to the mainland on occasion, and Lorie took to meeting the March women on the shore with his cart even when she didn’t. It became clear that though Beth had never complained of it, there were often times she meant to take a ferry to Manns Harbor but couldn’t, as anyone with a skiff or the like was on the water hoping to earn a wage or transporting soldiers, and a young woman or two was no one’s priority.
“It’s also that Beth doesn’t let them know she’s there,” Amy informed Lorie and Jo, while he charioted them to the big house one day near the summer’s end. “She’ll sit by the shore with her scraps and her pile of clothing, and she’ll begin disassembling it right there, so that anyone who might ferry her across thinks she’s only there to admire the water while she works!”
“Is that so, Beth?” Jo said, whipping her head around to interrogate her mildest sister.
“I won’t now,” the girl said back, “now that Lorie might be waiting on the other side for me. But I’m sure they know I’d like to cross when I do it so often, and there’s almost no one I haven’t ridden with.”
“But you could say something,” Jo said.
“I’d feel so demanding, especially when I know they’re seeking work, and I have nothing to pay them except whatever food is left over from a meal.” Beth looked a bit self-conscious now that a behavior she’d thought perfectly normal had an audience discussing it as though it weren’t.
“I speak up whenever I’m with her, so it’s just lucky I don’t go to school so I can come along,” Amy declared, with the kind of sigh Mammy made when there’d been a lingering concern and now it was relieved.
“The worst that can happen is that I wait a little while, and I don’t mind,” Beth replied.
“Why, angelic Beth,” Lorie said, reins in his hand and exaggeratedly bouncing as the horse pulled the somewhat rickety cart along. “That may be the closest I’ve ever heard you come to a self-defense.”
“Sisters have no need to defend themselves against each other,” Beth told him before Jo slapped his arm with the back of her hand.
“Around the two of you, she might,” he replied without hesitation, nodding first at Joanna and then toward Amy.
“You won’t endear yourself to us by playing devil’s advocate, sir,” Jo said. “I may have claimed you, but you would be wise to mind yourself where sisters are concerned.”
“I’m advocating for Bethlehem, if anything, and she’s no devil.”
“Did I say something unkind, Beth?” Amy asked, her eyes wide and her lips downturned in the beginning of a very genuine pout.
“I don’t think so at all,” Beth replied, yanking her baby sister toward her. Amy was sometimes a mess of energy and self-conscious nerves when Lorie was around, Bethlehem had noticed, and she meant to give the girl a quick peck on the cheek, but just then one of the wheels sank into a small hole before bouncing back out, and the two collided foreheads instead.
“Lorie!” Jo cried. “For someone so concerned with the treatment of my darling sisters, you’re a terribly reckless driver!”
“I’m sorry, girls,” he said through a bellowing laugh. “I honestly didn’t see the hole in the road until it was too late. We didn’t lose anyone, did we?” He turned to survey his cargo, and threw his hand back as though to confirm all was still in order. Beth and Amy ducked out of his reach each time his arm swung from one side to the other. “Ah, there it is,” he said, at the sight of Beth’s dimple. “We’re fine, then.”
The four laughed and jostled over the road awhile longer, until they were at the front door of the big house, and Lorie leapt down to help Beth and then her bundles into the house.
“I’ll come with you and Lorie today,” Amy exclaimed to Jo when Lorie had her under the arms because she’d waited for him to return rather than getting down on her own.
“No, Amy, you’ll help Beth in the sewing room, as you’re meant to.”
“But I’m very little help at all, ask her! I tear too roughly and ruin the thread she’d prefer to keep, or I practice dance positions and turns, and I think the racket is horribly distracting for her!”
“Then be less distracting,” Jo insisted, leaning in so that her forehead threatened to connect with Amy’s the way Beth’s had on the bumpy ride.
“Perhaps I’m a better writer’s assistant than a seamstress,” Amy pleaded. “She won’t miss me, I swear—look, she’s already gone up the stairs without me!”
“Amethyst,” Jo said, in a serious tone that quieted her sister. “You need to keep an eye on Beth.”
At the reminder, the young girl sank onto the soles of her feet, which was a very strange stance to find her in, and Jo knew it meant that she was listening.
“We don’t want her to feel as though we’re circling her at all times, or more so than before she fell ill,” Jo said quietly, tugging lovingly on one of Amy’s two curls. It had been positively awe-inspiring, the change she’d seen in her youngest sister. It wasn’t just that she wanted to be near Lorie—it was what else she’d begun to tolerate. She’d let Meg moisturize and stretch her hair with a twisting twine method that for a night made her head look like a sea star, and then she’d allowed her near again with the curling iron so that the two halves of her perfectly parted hair now hung over her shoulders in spiral curls. It was a wonder what Lorie’s coming had done. “Beth is accustomed to your company,” Jo carried on, through a slight smile she couldn’t help. “So it’s best for you to be the one to keep close while she works. We can put our fun aside for family’s sake once in a while. Can’t we?”
Lorie tugged on Amy’s other curl and then raised an innocent brow at her while he snuck both hands behind his back.
“Of course we can,” Amy replied. “I’m a very good sister.”
Lorie snorted, and then pretended to sneeze.
“You are,” Jo said, nudging Lorie at the waist and then hugging Amy. She planted a kiss on the top of Amy’s head, right on the impossibly perfect part Meg had drawn.
“The two of you will make insufferable parents, though,” Amy went on as she danced up the few
steps to the front door. Jo’s head leapt back as though in astonishment, but before she could speak, Amy finished, “You’re going to drive your children positively mad!” And she disappeared into the house, closing the door behind her.
When Jo still could not conjure up any words in reply, she simply turned with a gaping mouth and wide eyes to Lorie, whose own eyes drifted away. He began whistling, and he retrieved Jo’s writing satchel and headed off toward a row of trees.
* * *
“And if our able-bodied men are all enticed to war ,” Jo said her words aloud, her pen at the ready to continue when she was satisfied with the sentence’s construction, “we will be transformed into something the Freedpeople Colony never was: a contraband camp. Or should I say instead…”
She trailed off, eyes fixed, though she saw none of the world around her. Not the beautiful loblolly pine Lorie had settled them beneath, with its long trunk and high canopy like a parasol made into a tree, and not Lorie, though he sat directly in front of her, hunched so that his back made a workable desk on which she could draft her next newsletter.
“Or should you say instead,” Lorie repeated, hoping to coax her back to external conversation. When her mind began the work of composition, often she spoke in fragments or retired from speaking aloud at all. Lorie hadn’t known Joanna in the old life, nor had he ever known an artist, to his knowledge. If he had, it hadn’t been intimately enough to witness their creative process. “Or should you say…”
“Hold still,” she said absently.
“You aren’t even writing, Jo. I’d feel it, remember?”
“Shh.”
“And I have no objection to playing desk for you, maestro, but it occurs to me that ink stains your fingers on a constant basis—”
“Shh.”
“—in which case, it would likely do the same to my shirt, if that paper isn’t thick enough, yes?”
“Lorie, would you please be quiet, for the sake of heaven!”
“I have but one shirt, Joanna, be reasonable!”
“Forget it.” She snatched the paper from his back and laid it in the grass, using her pen and the ink she carried in a closeable jar to weigh it down. “You are dead set on disrupting my work, and I need to concentrate. Stop giggling.”
“I’m sorry, Jo,” Lorie said, still laughing when he turned and took her wrist to keep her from standing and storming away. She stood anyway and he was forced to as well, or else lose his hold. “But you don’t need to concentrate at all. You’ll be composing that newsletter in your mind until it’s finished, whether I interrupt you with my charming wit or not. You couldn’t help it.”
“It’s a different thing, to write something for unfamiliar eyes,” she insisted, though it was clear she wasn’t upset at him. She yanked her wrist away, and he waited with an open palm until she absently dropped her arm back into his grasp. “And to write something on behalf of so many people. They haven’t asked me to, and perhaps they’ll never read it themselves. But that’s even more reason to take very seriously the freedpeople my words represent.”
Lorie sobered at that. “I’m sorry, Jo. I don’t mean to make light of your work. I take it seriously, too.”
“Oh, Lorie,” she said, pushing at his chest as though to shove him away, though she applied no pressure. “I know that. Of course you’re fine. And you’re right, I’ll be composing it all day, whether I write it down this minute or not. That’s how I wrote before Mammy and Meg supplied me with paper and ink.”
“And your hands were unblemished then,” Lorie imagined aloud, because he hadn’t known her then and didn’t like to think such a time existed. He held her writing hand in both of his now, inspecting each finger, though he knew which two wore the ink smudges.
“Yes. But only the March family knew my mind.” Jo sighed, and Lorie glanced up from her fingers, though he didn’t let them go.
“You sound as though you miss it,” he said, and at first Jo only made a contemplative sound and looked beside him, at the shadow of the loblolly tree.
“It’s not humility.”
“Thank God.”
“It’s … I think I’ll always prefer reciting my words aloud. Conjuring and arranging them, and meditating on them before they exist anywhere outside my mind. Spending time with my own mind.” She took back her hands and let one drape around her waist before balancing the other on it so that she could rest her chin on a fist. “I know its value, but the writing is an exercise in itself. Yes, it allows me to commit my thoughts to history, but so does an oral telling. It’s the way we shared our stories and histories before, isn’t it? Not just me, in the old life, but all Black people. It never seemed flimsy or frail before. It wasn’t the advent of ink or paper that gave our words their importance when the words existed first.”
“But now ideas are judged by the precision with which they’re recorded,” Lorie continued when he knew just what she meant.
“Yes. Now there’s a new way things must be spoken to be considered at all. A barrier that feels meant to rank and order those stories and histories and decide which deserve to be read and remembered.”
“Yours will be, Jo. They already are.”
“I know,” she said. “It isn’t just my exclusion that concerns me.”
They stood quietly together for a while, and it was possible to hear people nearby, closer to the big house and off in the nearby woods. There was a children’s chorus emanating from there, which likely meant Beth had enlisted the young ones staying at the big house for a mushroom foraging again. There were beautiful golden chanterelles to be found between the trees, easy for even the youngest child to identify. Beth wouldn’t ask them if they didn’t treat it like play, and they loved the fragrance when they found them, rewarded with a faint aroma like an apricot when they sniffed the cap to confirm what anyone could tell by the lavish color.
Beth used them to dye fabric, when she had enough of them, or a small enough piece of clothing, making something look extravagant that had once been dull or simply unremarkable. When Jo marveled at her younger sister’s artistry, the whole family insisted that her own words likewise transformed naked and unremarkable paper. She tried to see it similarly, if only because her newsletters had a purpose she could not otherwise serve. She couldn’t speak to Northern philanthropists otherwise, and she needed to, for the colony’s sake.
“Where’ve you gone now?” Lorie said, tipping his head as though he might see more of her despite that she was right in front of him. “What are you thinking of?”
“My sisters, of course.”
“Of course a sister,” he replied knowingly. “I meant which one?”
“Bethlehem, just then. And now Amy, because she’d better not be in the woods foraging with the others. She needs to be at Beth’s side, and she needs to know that without being reminded.”
“Come on,” he said, and Lorie offered Jo his hand.
“What?”
“Are we going to check that Beth is well, and that Amy is by her side, or aren’t we?”
Jo snatched her paper from the grass, and the pen and ink jar, too, balancing them on Lorie’s palm instead of her hand. He smirked and nodded.
“Of course we are,” she said definitively, and led him back to the big house.
* * *
It seemed a silly question, but Meg wanted to ask Mammy whether at nineteen her mother considered her a woman or a child, and how she should know for herself.
It was a silly question, which is why she couldn’t bring herself to ask it. She must be a woman. A young one, of course, but a woman all the same. She taught freedpeople their lessons, after all. All day, she worked at instructing and encouraging and correcting and explaining. There was much of it that overlapped the work of a mother, and she did try her best to be nurturing, especially with the children, as they could all do with more of that after the old life. Of course, only a young woman would be trusted to do the work she did.
When she came home, Meg cooked of
ten so that Mammy wouldn’t have to. It didn’t seem fair in a home with so many capable people that all the cooking and cleaning should fall to one, and while the sentiment seemed shared at least with the two middle daughters, neither seemed to have Meg’s imperative about it.
There was also the matter of her correspondence with Joseph Williams, which whether or not it was precisely romantic in nature must at least be prospective just by the fact that she received letters from a young man who had asked for the privilege. Her baby sister might think her dreadfully boring, and she might not have the gregarious appeal of Joanna, but at the reception Meg had danced with another young man altogether, and all day her thoughts threatened to gallop away from her lessons and students to one or the other of those young men, wondering which of them she was meant to court. Or whether either of them thought of her throughout their day, and when that mystery might be resolved.
All things considered, there seemed little question that she’d well and truly left childhood behind, but then Amy posited rather frequently that she ’d done the same, and so Meg resolved that the only way to know for certain was to ask Mammy, silly question or not.
In the girls’ bedroom, while they changed out of their work dresses, Meg opened her mouth to begin several times before she was brave enough to follow through. Luckily her mother was unfastening the hoop frame that only she and Meg needed to wear, as their particular labor required a standard of presentability to which neither Jo nor Beth was held.
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix: 2 (Remixed Classics) Page 10