“Did you see me, Jo?” Amy asked when she reached her sister.
“I did.” Jo swept the girl’s wayward wisps of hair back from her face, but it was no use. Amy had improved in habits pertaining to her hair, but despite that and despite that the weather was mild now, the amount of exertion she performed each day ensured that she sweat out the hot iron’s effect—especially now that she was meeting with Constance several times a week to practice techniques none of them had ever heard of. It was wild in a way Jo would always find more lovely than the neatest flat braid, some hair straight and some reverted back to its natural curl, and tendrils of it framing a face vibrant with enthusiasm.
In Boston, Jo would have to be the voice of Mammy and Meg, though. She couldn’t be her tempestuous self, or encourage wildness, not where Amy was concerned.
The distance she would soon travel made Jo glance over her shoulder, though she didn’t quite look at the house, or the sister hidden inside.
“Am I quarrelsome?” she asked aloud, and only Amy was there to answer.
“What a question, Joanna.” The younger girl took both her hands. “You’re angelic. You exceed every wish I’ve had in a sister.”
“That’s what I get for asking the sister I’m escorting on a life-changing adventure, I suppose.” Joanna brought their laced fingers up between them and then leaned a bit into the sturdiness the hold provided.
“Is my opinion less valuable because I cherish you?”
“Am I less angelic if I’ve changed my mind about Boston?”
“Jo, I’ll die!”
“And there’s my answer.”
“All right, Joanna, you’re quarrelsome indeed.”
“Don’t pout, Amy,” she said with a laugh, and kissed her sister’s forehead. “It’s not becoming.”
“You’d better not become tame and mundane just because you’re my chaperone.”
“I’ve promised Mammy I would, and that’s a condition of our agreement. Am I quarrelsome or angelic now?” She gave Amy’s hands a squeeze.
“You’re impossible! Lorie’s the one escorting us both.”
At the sound of his name, he looked over, and Jo briefly held his gaze before turning back to her little sister. Behind her, Mammy approached, traveling the same path Amy had taken, with a much more reasonable pace and cadence, and no leaps or twirls. Jo wished sometimes that her mother would.
She turned Amy around by the shoulders, and, as expected, the girl sprang to life, waving both hands above her head as though instead of welcoming her mother, she was bidding bon voyage to a ship and its seafaring passengers.
Mammy tucked two envelopes into the waist of her skirt and threw her arms out wide to catch Amy. When she had her youngest in an embrace, Mammy kissed the air at Jo, who blew one back before heading in the house to make peace with Meg before the whole family was together inside.
“May I help with anything?” she asked when she met her sister in the front room. Meg was already placing the sweet bread next to a large serving dish of chicken salad.
“No, thank you,” Meg answered, wiping her hands on the apron tied around her waist.
Afterward the two stood without speaking. Beth and Ella could be heard in the room that used to belong to Papa and Mammy, and the tenor of Lorie’s and Wisdom’s voices wafted in from outside.
“Perhaps Wisdom would like to eat with us,” Jo said, with an uncharacteristically awkward cadence.
Meg bit the inside of her lip, but her brow seemed to perk up at the idea.
“He’s done such fine work in the yard on our behalf, and the Union doesn’t pay him for the upkeep. He should at least have a good meal,” Jo finished, to compliment her sister’s cooking without seeming too effusive.
“He does, doesn’t he?” A small smile tugged at Meg’s lips. “Perhaps I’ll invite him for supper then,” she said, and immediately took steps toward the front door, which opened just before she arrived.
“Hello, my dears,” Mammy said as she and Amy entered.
“Hello, Mammy.” Meg meant to kiss her mother on the cheek and then slip around her before Wisdom could finish his work and his conversation and be on to the next yard.
“There’s a letter for you,” Mammy said, and Meg stopped just as abruptly as if her skirt had gotten caught on a wayward nail. “Look, darling! Joseph Williams has written again!”
Meg didn’t look out the open front door, but when Wisdom walked past the March house with his mower in his hands, she saw the way he dipped his chin toward her in place of goodbye. She didn’t go after him. She didn’t turn and look at Jo, either—she only took the letter her mother offered and noticed that on the outside of the envelope, there was a landscape. It didn’t cover more than half the paper, but Joseph had drawn what she knew must be Roanoke’s shore.
“He’s decorated it this time,” Mammy said, smiling. “Isn’t it lovely, Meg? And despite that you hadn’t written back.”
“Or perhaps because I hadn’t,” Meg said, and her wonderment could not be hidden. She was genuinely pleased while she turned the envelope over in her hands. She’d taken a strong stance, after all, not replying to the sterility of Joseph’s last correspondence, and that he’d written again must mean he’d understood.
She had nothing to apologize for, because her excitement returned and fluttered about in her chest despite that she’d been on her way to invite Wisdom Carter to supper. Hoping to one day marry and being married were very different things, and she hadn’t made a promise to anyone, nor had she been asked to. She’d done nothing wrong, she was certain. She only wished someone else would say so.
For her part, Jo wanted to say that Meg had done well to withhold her attention from a man who hadn’t even taken the trouble to woo her, but she didn’t. She didn’t want it to come out wrong, as so many things seemed to when she was speaking to those she uniquely loved.
Newsletters were simple matters, it turned out, requiring only that she stand firm in her convictions and in what was observably going on—and going wrong—in the world. These days, Jo had much less confidence in her ability to communicate when the matter was her own heart, and when the feelings of her favorite people were involved. It made her nervous to go so far away, even in service of another sister, in case distance compounded such strains.
Meg did not quite turn toward her sister. She only looked back over her shoulder because she knew that Jo was there, and when Meg had tucked the letter at her waist as Mammy had done, she went back to the kitchen alone.
* * *
When the women and Lorie were already sitting at the table or nearby in the front room enjoying their supper and animated conversations, Orange hobbled into the home. He was a stout older man with a bald head and bowed legs, and he rocked as he went, though he refused a cane or walking stick. Ella found a way to wrap her arms around her father’s arm when they walked side by side and she leaned into him so that she always appeared to do the work of a tent pole, but honestly he managed fine on his own.
Orange came behind Ella’s chair and reached around to kiss Baby Fanny, who was sat on her mother’s lap as though it were a throne. When first his daughter and then several others asked him to join them for supper, the man waved them off. He rarely ate at the table, preferring to take his portion and return to the bed Mammy had given up so that he and his family could move in. He liked having his legs drawn up, though the time that Amy had asked for her breakfast to be brought into the bedroom so that she needn’t fully wake in order to eat it, Mammy had chastised her laziness. Rules were of course different for adults, especially those advanced in years, and allowances were made for Beth, too, when she was weak.
Orange came up alongside Beth’s chair next and unwrapped the kerchief he’d been holding, gingerly taking cooked crawfish from inside and arranging them on her plate.
“Oh,” Beth said, smiling up and down the table, and then at the old man himself. “Mr. Orange, thank you.”
“Why does he only bring enoug
h for Beth?” Amy asked Jo in a whisper, but her older sister wore a look of quizzical amusement just like all the others, and she only shrugged in reply.
Orange didn’t speak, or at least no one in the March family had heard him do so. He must, since Ella often told them her father’s thoughts. Sometimes they would overhear a man’s gruff timbre when he played with Baby Fanny, but though the sounds he made matched the melody and intonations of a conversation, when they listened closely, the family found they could make out no words.
He was doing it now, making his low and rumbly noises as he transferred the crawfish from his hand to Beth’s supper plate, and the young woman inclined her head toward him as though he were merely speaking softly. Whatever Orange meant, she couldn’t know without waiting for the old man to finish his task and turning to his daughter. When he was shuffling back to his room, shaking out the handkerchief before tucking it into his pocket, Ella spoke not just to Beth, but to the entire family.
“It’s for her condition,” she explained. “That’s why he brings them just to Bethlehem.”
“Crawfish?” Mammy asked, and everyone exchanged glances before returning their attention to the old man’s daughter. “For Beth’s illness?”
“Daddy’s seen it before.”
Their eyes or mouths grew wide at the news, though Amy might’ve been the only one distracted by wondering how exactly Orange had relayed this to Ella. Perhaps he spoke to her through hand signs or by scribbling on a small slate chalkboard like Meg said some of the missionary teachers had brought south with them, despite that Amy had never seen one. She wasn’t permitted in the family’s bedroom to check, of course, though it had belonged to her parents. And perhaps there was such a thing as transferring thoughts without speech at all. It had happened more than once that she’d meant to say something, and another of her sisters said that precise thing in her place. Though a father and daughter were different, perhaps without a larger family something like that magic had developed between Orange and Ella.
“Go on, darling,” Mammy pressed Ella, nearly perched at the edge of her seat and helpless to keep her eyes from darting to her dear Bethlehem. The girl had winced when leaning over the kitchen fire or the watering pump out back for two days before finally confessing a strange pain that seemed to live on one side of her lower back. When told, Constance Evergreen had been confounded, by her own admission, as embarrassed as she was absolutely clueless. Beth seemed to have myriad ailments, she’d said, and none of them connected in any discernible way.
And now an old man who’d never seen the inside of a medical book—or a schoolroom for that matter—was said to have seen it before.
“How much of what Beth suffers has he seen in others?” Mammy asked, not wanting to sound skeptical enough to offend. “We’ve lived in the house together for a little while now, I know, and certainly your father must’ve noticed at least a selection of Beth’s symptoms. It’s just that our nurse has been at a loss because there seem so many, and so inconsistently.”
“I’ve sat with her and Miss Evergreen a time or two,” Ella agreed. “And I know it seems to defy a pattern or diagnosis.”
It didn’t bother Beth to be spoken of in her own presence, something which always frustrated Amy and Jo.
“If not a pattern,” she said, her voice lilting with what she hoped might be encouragement, “I’ve begun to think of it as something like a round. Someone sings, and then after a moment, someone else takes up the melody, but from the beginning, so that even one melody begins to sound like many.”
“What a whimsical way to describe chronic illness, Beth,” Meg said in a soft voice that was at once adoring and melancholy, and perhaps afraid.
Ella had noticed the way the March women brightened their faces or intentionally lifted their brows and lips whenever discussions turned to the mystery that had befallen their Beth. They didn’t seem able to lament or even properly express their worry, when there were so many of them. One never knew who among them would be devastated by the hearing, and so all five lifted their chins when they might have let them fall. They smiled at each other as though they knew when it was needed, and though auctions meant that Ella had not seen her own siblings in years, she felt certain that the March women did know, always, when a heart among them was heavy and in need of care.
“Daddy has kept watch,” Ella told them, and then grinned at her child, to lighten the mood for her kin as the Marches had taught her by example. “And so have I. I’ve seen the fainting, and fatigue, and weakness—”
“Bruises, sometimes,” Beth offered, with a pout that didn’t linger long. She turned her forearm one way and then the other, though the latest discoloration was finally beginning to fade.
“Aching,” Amy said. “Sometimes I try to sleep very still, so that I don’t hurt her legs.” She lowered her head when she was done, and a quiet fell over the room for a moment. If her sisters had reached for her, the youngest March girl wouldn’t have been able to help but cry, so it was a relief that it was Lorie who pulled her off of her chair and onto his lap. She stayed just long enough to lay her head on his shoulder before leaping back to her own seat, her forlorn expression replaced with a wide grin.
“And the trouble in your back.” Mammy resumed the listing of ailments. She locked eyes with Beth, as though she’d be able to see into her and find any hidden things. There was a special kind of fear that a mother experienced when she couldn’t be certain she knew all of what her child suffered. “You said it felt tight, like a stone had been put there.”
“Constance says it’s common enough in older patients,” Beth said. “And those who are already very ill.”
A hush fell again.
“I must drink water regularly, she said, and I do try, but…” Her voice tapered off.
“Beth,” Meg urged her. “What is it?”
Beth glanced toward Lorie a time or two and, understanding, he placed his fingers in his ears and began to hum.
When Beth leaned forward, all the women at the table did as well.
“I hate having to get out of bed so often to relieve myself.”
At first no one said anything, each holding their breath and the gazes of another. It was Mammy who finally broke, an unladylike snort escaping her before transforming quickly into a laugh. The boisterous sound was met with incredulity from her daughters, Ella, and Lorie, but Baby Fanny—who was unaccustomed to such an outburst from the matriarch—fell into frightened tears.
“Oh, my dear,” Ella cooed to her daughter amusedly, turning the child around so that the girl’s chubby arms could wrap around her neck.
“Mammy,” Meg said, covering her mouth to hide a smile and shaking her head.
For her part, Mrs. March was happy to be so overwhelmed with something other than fear or sadness where her Bethlehem was concerned, and she pushed back from the table as laughter made tight balls of her cheeks, sore already. She came around the table, arms outstretched.
“My funny angel,” she said when her daughter stood and with a smile of her own curled into her mother’s embrace. Beth laid her head on Mammy’s collarbone, so she was the only one who didn’t see when the sadness returned, and her mother’s face, which had been rouged with her delight, crumpled into tears. “You’re my angel, Bethlehem.”
“I love you, Mammy,” Beth whispered.
Lorie took Amy back into his arms, while Ella hugged her own child close, and beneath the table, Meg took Jo’s hand.
* * *
Lorie said goodnight when the front room had been returned to order and all the chaos of supper calmed, with Jo and Meg helping Mammy clean the dishes.
Ella put Baby Fanny down with Orange and then relaxed on the bed Beth shared with her younger sister.
Amy hummed to herself while she swayed in the small space still unoccupied. Mammy had taken to sleeping on the floor, and because there was very little room to move about, Amy eventually drifted back out to the front room, or else to the kitchen where her dancing
could be admired. Only then did Ella furnish Beth with a tattered pamphlet.
“About Going To Liberia ,” Beth read aloud before turning to her friend. “What’s this?”
“Have you heard of it?” Ella asked, and there was excitement in her eyes.
“Have I heard of Liberia? Of course I have. I think everyone must’ve by now.”
“And have you read about it for yourself?” Ella pressed, and Beth’s brow crinkled.
“No. I suppose I never had reason enough to, since I’d never have been sent there by an enslaver.”
“That isn’t the only way Black folk have gone, though,” Ella interjected, and Beth, seeing that her friend had many thoughts on the matter—enough at least to bring the subject to conversation unsolicited—let her lips rest together in invitation. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be forceful. I’m overexcited.”
Beth gave her an encouraging smile.
“I’ve been waiting to share this with you. Daddy said the condition you have comes from the continent. Africa.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a condition that white folks don’t understand because it doesn’t afflict them. Their medicine hasn’t yet developed beyond what they experience for themselves.”
“I see,” Beth said, temperate in her replies until she understood all that Ella had been preparing to tell her.
“It isn’t a mystery simply because they have no name for it, Bethlehem. It’s proof that you’re descended from African peoples, and it’s almost like a birthright, inviting you home.”
At that, Beth’s lips fell. She didn’t grimace or give an unpleasant expression, but she no longer smiled.
“Roanoke is home, Ella. The Freedpeople Colony, with my sisters.”
“May I confess something to you?” she asked, and waited for her friend to gesture permission. “I don’t think home can be found on these shores. Not after what’s been done. Not this island, and not the mainland, either. It seems to me that it’d require an inhuman and unfair gift of forgiveness to those still certain that we’re inferior, and I cannot offer that any more than I can raise my daughter to do so.” Ella glanced up as though surprised at herself. “I’m sorry, Bethlehem. I don’t mean to upset you.”
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix: 2 (Remixed Classics) Page 15