“These buildings could be storefronts, easily,” she told her phantom Lorie, with an exasperated shake of her head. “Instead of walking to the fisheries or all the way to shore, the freedpeople can have our own shops, on land we own.”
And she was right. Corinth in Mississippi already turned a profit, and Roanoke could do the same.
Lorie just wasn’t looking far enough ahead. He looked at the colony and saw the present. The white presence.
Jo sighed and wished he really were there beside her. She’d lace her arm around his and push her forehead into his shoulder while they walked.
It made sense that he was still too hurt by the recent past to imagine life after it—but white folks didn’t define Roanoke. It was called the Freedpeople Colony because that was who it was for.
“How do you not see that?”
They were too alike for him not to, she thought, and then her phantom Lorie said something back.
Then we’re too alike for you not to have known the way I love you.
She spun to find that, of course, he wasn’t there. She could pretend he hadn’t said it, because he hadn’t. So Jo turned and walked past the building where her mother worked, and then she picked up the pace.
The village was up ahead, and thin, docile smoke curled in the evening air. Signs of life and community, like the glow of candlelight that created a warm halo over the three avenues and their grid of streets.
There was a warm glow inside Jo to match, and she would see it last. The light and the colony. They would all see it evolve, as living things were wont to do. Instead of fleeing north, the colonies, like Corinth and Roanoke, would see Black people from up north migrating south. Why wouldn’t they? If they could live among their people, in safety and certainty, in their own homes, to harvest their own fields, and profit by their own work, and have time away from even the friendliest white citizen so that perhaps in time even the wounds of slavery could heal?
Then he would, too.
“All right, Lorie,” Jo said to her phantom friend when she realized she’d already begun composing her next newsletter. She could hear the words coming together, like water after the oar departed. They were meant for a different audience than she had spoken to before. Many of the donors and patrons she’d attracted were white Northerners with complicated motives behind their support.
If nothing else, Lorie’s words inspired her to turn her attention away from them. To enlist more than financial support from afar, but rather to encourage citizenship. To invite those who wanted to live in freedom together, as a community. It would show more than Lorie that Roanoke was not a Union camp. It wasn’t a wartime sanctuary. It was a new way of life. A new world.
My whole world is you.
Jo stopped before she stumbled.
A conversation from a nearby home swelled up around her, the voices replacing Lorie’s. A man and woman were laughing on the other side of an open window shutter, and she didn’t have to look to know that they were probably man and wife. Men and women of a certain age always seemed to be.
“Maybe I am the odd one,” Jo said, but softly since now she really and truly spoke to herself.
She didn’t feel odd. She never had. In fact, up until the end of their conversation at the shore, Jo had felt wonderful. She’d begun to feel wonderful again, as soon as she’d put something else at the front of her mind, and she hadn’t needed to push Lorie out to do it.
She took a careful step forward, as though testing that there was still ground before her, and then tried to return to walking without having to take care.
“You aren’t odd, either,” she said of Lorie, and she was sure of that. If she told Meg or Mammy what had transpired between them, she was certain they’d pity him. They’d likely think his attempt perfectly understandable—and in that case, would they think her reaction wrong?
Jo stopped again, at the corner of Lincoln and 4th, as though concerned her mother and sister might see her from there.
She didn’t know why, but she felt convinced they could not both be right, and at this very moment, the man and woman she’d heard laughing seemed to blame. The way she loved Lorie and the way he apparently loved her could not both be normal, or else she’d be able to recall a single relationship between a man and a woman that looked like theirs without becoming something else.
If it was Jo’s reaction her mother and sister would find odd, then what must they have thought was between her and Lorie all this time? What must they have made of her calling him hers?
“All this time,” she whispered aloud. All this time, she’d thought it made perfect sense to everyone, or at least to Lorie and those who knew her best. If it didn’t …
She didn’t know what to do, and that was foreign in itself. She wanted to rush to the shore and find an abandoned skiff to cross the sound, and run all the way to the big house, to find Lorie and ask him for his help.
That the problem had to do with him was what finally weighed Jo down as she walked the final steps back home. No thoughts of the colony, and a new objective, and the fervor that always accompanied one could distract her again.
Something had to be done about Lorie, and Lorie could not help her decide what.
X
The weather was mild now, and Beth often spent time in the yard, holding one of Baby Fanny’s hands while Ella held the other so that the child thought herself a prodigy. She was too young to walk on her own, but it amused the two young women endlessly to watch her dimpled thighs and chunky legs lurching forward, one puffy foot stomping the soft earth after the other, a look of concentration and hubris on the little girl’s face.
“She thinks she’s doing it all on her own,” Beth said, smiling as she and Ella kept their backs bowed so that they could reach the infant, whose tight grip on their fingers did not dissuade her self-satisfaction.
“I’m glad she does,” Ella replied, laughing. “I want my help to be so natural to her that she credits it to herself. She thinks she’s strong, look at her! Imagine thinking that from birth, Bethlehem. Imagine what she’ll do.”
Ella released Baby Fanny’s hand so that Beth could take them both, watching with a palpable adoration as her friend and her little one twirled around. After a moment, she scooped Fanny up, the baby tumbling over in her mother’s arms until her naked belly reached the young woman’s lips. When Ella blew against it, Fanny squealed her long, loud baby giggle, and Beth laughed along.
“There’s my littlest favorite girl.” Wisdom Carter stood just outside the lawn, on the dusty avenue, as though he couldn’t cross the property line before being invited.
Ella and Beth straightened, happily, and once acknowledged, Wisdom stepped forward, lowering his head in greeting.
“Who’s your favorite of the big girls then?” Ella asked him, bouncing Baby Fanny in the air until Wisdom caught her with an openmouthed smile. “Didn’t you hear me, Wisdom?” she goaded.
“I’m saying hello to Fanny if you don’t mind, Ella.”
He’d let go of the mower he’d brought to hold the baby, and Beth righted it, holding the handles as though she might put it to use herself. She wouldn’t. It was the reason Wisdom had come. Or, it was his excuse anyway.
True, the grass was just shy of an unruly length, and in danger of becoming unsightly, but it was also patchy at best. The village had once been forest, and when the trees were felled to make lots, a local sounder of pigs had been employed to turn the earth, rooting around in the soil to find their food. After that, some goats made quick work of the bramble and the harsher stuff. When grass finally began to grow, and before Jo’s newsletter sped up the building process and the homes began to sprout up, the occasional grazing of a cow or horse had been enough to keep things trim and in order. Once families began to move in, every animal occasionally set free in the village to graze was tromping down personal gardens, when they didn’t devour them first, and becoming a nuisance among clotheslines.
Among the treasures at the big house, t
here’d been a British mower, though it’d taken awhile before anyone knew what it was. They were accustomed to scythes, which, despite being a long blade completely unencumbered by rollers—and despite that they were swung from side to side—were considered perfectly safe tools. The imported contraption reduced the laboriousness of mowing—which was enough to make folk suspect its effectiveness—but Wisdom had become quite good with the machine. The day that Jo mentioned her eldest sister’s concern over how the village would keep itself tidy now that it was being properly inhabited, Wisdom became the colony’s lawn man.
He’d showed up first to the March house, with his short coily hair parted neatly on the left side as a symbol of his new professional station. He’d begun working before anyone knew he was there, having not announced himself and requesting no pay for the service. Meg only spied the tall young man once he’d started on the lot across the avenue, and when she stepped outside the front door, she saw his handiwork.
Now Beth held his machine upright while he tossed Baby Fanny over his head like she was his own. Wisdom didn’t have any children yet, and he wasn’t courting the child’s mother, but he couldn’t help entertaining the young ones whenever he came upon one. He had a mild enough manner that the sight delighted people, and so long as the child didn’t shy away from his company, he was looked upon like any other young person obviously looking forward to starting a family of his own.
“Meg’s in the house,” Beth told him when Ella had received her baby back, and Wisdom reached for his mower to begin work.
“Is she?” Wisdom’s eyes darted to the front door as though Meg might be standing there. Almost immediately, he dropped his gaze, watching his hands twist around the handle.
She hadn’t meant to make him self-conscious, but Beth couldn’t help but smile.
“Well,” he said. “I hope she’s had a lovely day. Teaching and reading, like she does.”
He stopped speaking, but his mouth remained slightly agape, and then he glanced up at Beth. She offered him the faintest smile, as encouraging as she could make it without causing discomfort.
“I’ll be at my task,” he said at last.
“All right, Wisdom,” Beth replied before following Ella into the house, where she immediately opened the window shutters.
Meg was in the kitchen, removing a cast iron skillet from the stove with thick pot holders she’d embroidered herself.
“Don’t you just adore that smell?” she asked at the sound of her sister’s entry.
“It’s lovely, Meg. Nothing’s as fragrant as your sweet bread.”
“Well, it’ll need time to cool, Beth,” she said amusedly when the girl remained. “And you’re free from working today, remember? That includes this kitchen. So do not bother asking whether I need any help.”
“I haven’t forgotten.” She laced her fingers behind her back as though to assuage her sister’s suspicions.
“Then what may I help you with?”
“Well, since I apparently am not permitted to get Wisdom Carter a glass of water, would you please take him one?”
Meg tensed and then tried to recover, though her eyes danced around the room for a moment.
“He never takes long to mow.”
When Meg didn’t take her hint, Beth made a rushing motion at her older sister until she snapped to action and rushed to prepare the young man something to drink.
She’d gotten all the way to the front step before Meg slowed again, collecting herself while Wisdom applied all of his strength to pushing the mower over the ground, sometimes pulling it backward over the same swatch of earth and mowing forward again if the blade didn’t seem to have made an impact.
The young man stopped and used the bottom of his shirt to wipe his face. He’d only been at the task a few minutes, but it was more strenuous than it seemed a task should be when one had the benefit of an imported invention, and his exposed skin was already gleaming with a light cover of sweat.
“Have something to drink?” Meg asked, leaning forward instead of approaching. When Wisdom saw her and quickly tucked his shirt back down the front of his trousers, she held the glass of water high and then cringed at the entire exchange. “If you can spare a moment.”
“Of course I can,” he said, releasing the handles, which remained upright because the machine was caught up in some unruly earth. For a moment he tried to lower them, his chin ticking back toward the porch, so that Meg knew he was painfully aware of her gaze, and then finally, he abandoned the thing and made his way toward her, wiping his hands on his pants.
He received the glass with a gratitude too quiet for Meg to hear anything but his breath escaping, and then held it without drinking.
“You’re very good with the mower,” Meg said, moving around him to look at the work he’d hardly begun.
“It’ll be a great convenience, I’m told. If I can learn it.”
“I think you’re learning quite well.”
“I appreciate that, Miss March. A compliment being paid by a teacher.” He smiled and looked down at the glass in his hands, though he could just as easily have looked at Meg. “I intend to take your lessons someday soon. If I can ever get my brother to agree to it.”
“And if he doesn’t?” she asked. “I’m sure Honor can make up his own mind, and you make up yours.”
Wisdom gave a soft sniff and raised one side of his mouth. When he finally met her gaze, Meg was smiling, her face too gentle to mean whatever he was accustomed to hearing.
“Although,” Meg continued, as though to prove it, “I know what it’s like to enjoy a sibling’s company. I’m sure you’d enjoy it more if he were there.”
“I guess I’ll have to grow out of that anyway,” he said, and then he looked at her directly for what felt like the first time since she’d come outside. Meg felt her breath catch, but she didn’t look away. She’d never let her eyes roam a young man’s face before, especially not when he was aware of her gaze, but Wisdom didn’t seem to mind. And he was such a handsome boy.
“I suppose,” Meg answered, but it was so belated, and it came out so breathy, that even she wondered what she’d meant by it.
Wisdom was still watching her, in that same mild manner that made his love of children something delightful rather than suspicious. His eyes were moving slowly back and forth between hers, as though he was daydreaming, and whatever he’d conjured in his imagination was something serene.
“I made sweet bread,” Meg told him.
“I bet no one cooks like you, Miss March,” Wisdom said, and it was so gentle and earnest that she had to stifle a laugh, lest he think she was making fun of him. She wouldn’t, ever. In fact, she wanted nothing more at the moment than to share what she’d prepared with Wisdom Carter, and she’d very nearly worked up the nerve to invite him inside.
“Why, Wisdom Carter, I’d no idea those new mowers operated unmanned.” Jo’s voice broke the space between them. “The things the British think up, my heavens.”
As though jolted from a dream, Wisdom pressed the glass of untouched water into Meg’s hands and half stumbled back to his machine.
“Hello, Jo,” he said, dipping his chin. “Lorie.”
“How’s the work, Wisdom?” Lorie slapped his back.
“I’ll just get back to it.”
“Anything I can do to help?” Lorie asked while Jo sidled up to her sister.
“Poor boy,” she said to Meg without taking her eyes off of Wisdom. “Oh.” And she turned her nose high in the air as though she’d caught a scent. “You made sweet bread, didn’t you? Oh, bless you, Meg.”
Jo took her sister’s face in her hands and kissed her cheek, until Meg could wrestle away.
“What’s the matter?” Jo asked, squinting.
“You’ll make me spill my water, that’s all.”
“Oh.” Jo smirked at her. “I thought it was Wisdom’s.”
“Can I ever have a moment’s peace from you, Joanna?”
Jo’s neck recoiled as th
ough she’d been slapped. “What does that mean?” she asked, but Meg’s brow had already broken, and she’d begun shifting her weight from one side to the other while her eyes welled. “Meg—”
“I’ll see to the rest of supper.” And she whirled around without saying goodbye to Wisdom, and left Lorie and Jo looking between each other and the quickly closed front door.
If she went after her sister, Jo felt certain the embarrassment she felt would become tangible, and the others would see it, too. She couldn’t explain the feeling herself, but that didn’t stop it existing, and being as accustomed to Meg’s encouragement as she was, it was almost unbearable.
It would’ve felt awful to be out of step with any of her sisters, but Meg especially—and especially now, when she so needed someone of Meg’s maturity and familiarity with courtship and expectation to help her determine if there really was anything wrong with her. While Lorie watched Wisdom work the mower, stepping back and dropping into a squat when asked whether the blade appeared to be turning, Jo swallowed hard. She tucked her thumb into her fist and squeezed, to feel the pressure and then the release.
Amy’s voice carried down the avenue, and when Jo looked up the street, she saw her youngest sister coming. She’d been running, and then suddenly threw her full weight into a leaping twirl, nearly crashing when she landed and catching herself on the toe of her brown boots and all ten fingertips as though she’d decided to do calisthenics right out in the open road.
Jo smiled because Amy laughed at herself. From her safe but unplanned landing, the youngest March girl’s mouth broke into joviality, and Jo could just hear the trill of it from where she stood. It was why she had told Mammy she’d take Amethyst to Boston. That joy. Even if Jo had no interest in the North, or Constance Evergreen’s benevolence, she had an interest in her sister’s joy.
Lorie had been there when the subject was broached with her, and he’d agreed, too, on the spot. He said nothing after, about the kiss Jo had spurned. He hadn’t asked what it meant if they took Amy north together, and she hadn’t offered an explanation. She’d only decided on something she hoped might ensure it never came up again—which she’d planned to ask Meg’s opinion on, before whatever had just passed between them.
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix: 2 (Remixed Classics) Page 14