“Nah,” he said, turning the jar around in his hands. “Daisy’s hair was finer.”
He set the jar back down and turned around. He was watching Mama’s face carefully, as if tracking which way it might turn. “Who’d all that belong to, then?” he said.
Mama took her glasses off her nose so that she could see him more clearly. “My youngest sister,” she said. She cleared her throat. “It is a keepsake.”
“And what happened to her?” Mr. Ben said. “You lose her to the body or the spirit?”
Mama took in a sharp breath. She made a low, guttural sound, as if something was wrenched from her throat. And then she looked quickly down at the newsprint in her hand. I could see her eyes moving back and forth, making some kind of calculation. I could see, in the fever of it, one eye wet and watery. She looked up.
“I think,” Mama said, her voice entirely steady but her eyes wet, “that we have come to an end with our time together, Mr. Ben. I think perhaps this is your last night here and you should wait for your sister in town. The back room at Culver’s will have you. He takes in many of our new arrivals, and—”
“So that’s it, then,” he said.
“Yes,” Mama said. “I believe it is.”
She turned to me, still crying, her voice deadly level. “Libertie, please make up Mr. Ben’s cot for him. Make sure it’s comfortable for his last night here with us. I will be working in the examination room. Be quick, girl. We have a long day tomorrow.”
And then she gathered up her ledger in her arms and walked out of the room. Mr. Ben watched her go.
He would not look at me, only at the fire, as I made his bed for him.
“Why did you go and do that?” I said as I pulled the cot closer to the fire for him.
“Leave it alone, girl.”
When the bed was done, I stood beside it. I did not know exactly what I was waiting for, what I hoped I or he would say. I knew I should say something in defense of Mama. If Lenore was here, she would have loudly cursed Mr. Ben the whole time. But he looked at me with a sadness so deep it startled me. I could not say anything to reprimand him. Instead, I stepped forward and hugged him fiercely.
He smelled of fresh-cut grass, up close. I had not expected that. He was still in my arms for a moment, and then he put his own arms around me once, a quick, tight squeeze, the tightest I’d ever known, the air squeezed out of my lungs. And then he let me go.
“I’ll be all right, girl,” he said. “You go on now.”
I was of an age then when I had just left Mama’s bed for one of my own, and even though I wished to comfort her, I did not wish to give up my hard-won independence of a cot to myself, under the eaves. I stood by her examination room door while she sat with her back toward me, bent over her books.
“Mama,” I began.
“Go to bed, Libertie.”
So I did.
I did not see Mr. Ben to Culver’s back room. Mama decided to take him there herself after Lenore came. She said, “You stay here, Libertie. You asked for your education to begin, and so it begins today.”
As Mama walked down the road with Mr. Ben, neither of them speaking or looking at each other, I imagined what secrets I was about to be initiated into. What big-woman ways I was about to learn. What I would be able to chart about hearts and spleens and tongues. But Lenore only turned to me and said, “You can start with the cats in the barn.”
We had a band of stray cats that had lived in the hay there since Mama was a girl. Big nature-raised hooligans with gnarled and matted fur, and sometimes sores on their sides. Whole generations that Mama and Lenore took care of, nursing their battle scars and birthing their litters. They terrified me. Even from far away, I knew them as too rough to be pets.
“Not them,” I said.
Lenore smirked. “Your mama said it’s how you’ll learn to care.”
So I took the bucket that Lenore usually did, and filled it with what she fed the cats—guts and bits from the kitchen, ground up for them. In the dim light of the barn, I could hear them all around me, and soon a few came closer and rubbed up against me. I felt panicked. Not because of their sharp teeth or their hissing, but because of their need. They wanted so much from me. The smell of their food made me ill, not because it was putrefying but because of how much it made them want me, made them mimic the action of love to get it, swirling around me, their softness hiding a deep, yawning hunger inside of them, just below their skin. I could feel it humming when they got too close. Their need was monstrous.
I fed them quick and ran from the barn, and when Mama came back, I wanted to tell her all of that, that their need was too much of a burden to carry. How could she do it? How could she see them so naked and yearning, and not want to turn away?
But Mama looked so tired, her face was so worn, that all I could say when I saw it was, “I don’t like the cats, Mama.”
Lenore sucked her teeth. “You bother her with that?”
But Mama was too tired, even, to hold my silliness against me. She did look disappointed, though.
But now that the idea of my taking on her work had gripped her, had become something she favored, Mama would not let me give up.
“You have to learn,” she told me. “Care does not come natural to me, either.”
What a lie, I thought. I could still see her, in my mind’s eye, walking slow and steady beside Mr. Ben, who had picked up her dead sister’s braids and tossed them aside, but who, I could tell, she understood had not meant it.
“But care, it is our lot now,” Mama was saying. “It is our service to others that defines us. We are doers of the Word.”
She sighed. “If you cannot keep the cats, you’ll learn how to keep the garden.”
The garden is no small thing to a homeopath. Mama kept a huge one to grow the most common things she needed: elderflower, ginger, mint, aloe. She was so orderly in everything, and the garden was no exception. The herbs were close by the door, and everything else was in neat rows, labeled clearly on posts made from scraps of wood. Up until now, the garden had been mostly Lenore’s domain. But Lenore was so busy with everything else she’d been paying it less attention, and the garden had begun to be unruly. When they needed something from it, Mama would question Lenore, and Lenore would think for a minute, and they would argue back and forth about where it should be.
“You will keep it in the correct order, Libertie,” Mama said. By which she meant the order of her imagination.
How was I to learn her mind? Before I could take over the garden, I would have to make a more diligent study of homeopathy, Mama’s discipline of medicine. “The guiding principle,” Mama had told me, many times as I grew, “is that like cures like.” But it was, as all things Mama insisted were straightforward, more complicated than that.
I was allowed a rest from my regular chores, and Mama had me sit in her examination room with her materia medica, the big black leather-bound book that listed every remedy and the diseases they belonged to.
Yarrow
is for
Anemia and Colic and Bed-Wetting and Hysteria and Nosebleeds and Hemorrhages and Varicose Veins and When Women’s Wombs Lose Children
Bitterwood
is for
Indigestion and Fever and Heartburn
Datura
is for
Drunkards and Stammering and Ecstasy
Belladonna
is for
Nymphomania and Gout and Hemorrhoids and Delirium and Depression
Calendula
is for
Burns and Knife Cuts and Flesh Wounds
Daisies
are for
Acne and Boils and Giddiness and Railway Spine
Milkweed
is for
Syphilis and Leprosy and Swelling of the Hands and Feet
Chamomile
is for
Restlessness and Waspishness and Bleeding Wombs
I had to transcribe what I read into notes, to remember which substanc
e was for which symptom. And then, the next morning, I took my scrap of paper and searched for each plant in its proper place, and recorded if it lived and flourished, or if it had become overgrown or invaded the space of another.
I did not have an eye for recognizing plants on sight, and I spent many frantic minutes comparing the description of a leaf pattern or a petal to what was flowering before me. The only things I could recognize with any ease were pansies. Not very impressive, as pansies grow everywhere and are known even to fools. But when I saw a thatch of them in my mama’s lanes, they cheered me—panting yellows and purples and blues.
Pansies are for Obstinate Skin
In my new life of study, I thought often of Mr. Ben. He lived in the back room of Culver’s now, a place I had never seen, only heard about. Culver himself had found him so waspish that he’d offered to pay Mr. Ben’s way across the river to Manhattan.
“To Mr. Ruggles’s place in Manhattan, on Golden Hill. Ruggles and his friends would help him.” This was Lenore, gossiping with Mama in the mornings while she banked the fire and I sat, head propped in my hands, reading the materia medica.
“And Mr. Ben refused?” Mama said.
Lenore nodded. “He said he’d die if he crossed the water. He said he’ll drown. Said he’s seen it in a dream. Says the water’s full of dead niggers calling his name, and he’d rather stay here, on land.”
“His sister can’t come soon enough,” Mama said.
But she did not come for another month, perhaps two. When I went into town sometimes, to bring a note to Culver or his son, I would see Mr. Ben wandering the crossroads, turning one way or another. He always had a smile for me. Weak, but he gave it. He never called me Libertie, though. Instead, he called me Black Gal.
“Hey there, Black Gal, and good morning to you.”
“What you doing for your mama, Black Gal?”
And it was with a sense of pity, which we both could feel between us, that I would return his greeting, show him what was in my bag, raise my hand back to him.
What I wanted to say each time was, How could you do that to Mama?
What I wanted to say each time was, Mama can be your friend.
What I wanted to say each time was, I wish I could be your friend, but this is too sad a start for friendship.
I was that age when I was not young enough to speak that frankly, yet I was not so old that I could pretend the sadness did not exist. So I raised my hand and smiled at him and then went home, to read the remedies and wonder what it meant to care. I had been so cavalier in my request to Mama, to be inducted into her world of secrets. It was overwhelming enough to care for bodies that had turned against themselves, that had sickened and soured on miasmas and disease, that had collapsed under the burden of fevers and chills.
It was still another thing to care for someone like Mr. Ben, who was of whole body, I knew, but of broken spirit.
But Mama said when the spirit broke like his had, it was not our realm.
I was not so sure.
Sometimes, I tried to talk to her about it. I would venture to her, as we sat side by side in her examination room, “What do you do with someone like a Mr. Ben?”
To which she would say quickly, “I do not know what you mean, Libertie.”
And we would be left in silence again.
Once, bored by the rows of flower names stretched out before me on a long night of study, I went out at night into the garden, to walk along the rows.
I absently rubbed my fingers along a yarrow bush’s leaves. After a few minutes, they began to swell and my tongue thickened. I looked down at my fattened fingertips in the moonlight and looked up and saw Mama through the window, sitting at her desk behind the muslin curtain, working through her ledger. As I watched her, I reached for the yarrow leaves and ripped five of them off the branch, stuffed them into my mouth, and chewed them. It did not take long before my cheeks and mouth began to itch. I ate three more leaves. Two more. And then I ran into the office, and finally Mama looked up from her ledger.
I had the satisfaction of seeing her startled, but she was not scared. She treated me as she would any other of her patients. I could not speak at that point, could barely breathe. I only held up the last few yarrow leaves that I clutched in my hand, and then she nodded and went to work.
She laid me down away from the fire. She went over to her shelves of medicine and reached for one glass jar—she didn’t even have to look at the label. She called for Lenore, her voice clear and strong, and when Lenore came in and saw my swollen face, she gasped.
“Keep her mouth open,” Mama said. “The danger here is losing air.”
Mama made my remedy and then came over and placed it under my tongue herself.
It was a kind of heaven, made dreamier because of my sick state—the room all hazy and warm, my mother’s face steady above me. I watched it as closely as I could, and saw her disappear again into her mind. But it was all right, because I knew, this time, when she went there she was thinking only of me. Of how to keep me alive. Of where my lungs and tongue connected, and how deeply I was taking in air, and what to do next to bring my body back. To be at the center of my mother’s work was a wonderful place to be. Mr. Ben had had that experience, and as I lay there, sick, I allowed myself to feel the full envy of it. I craved her care, even though I knew I should not.
I fell into a restless sleep. One of the times, when I surfaced from oblivion, I heard Mama whisper to Lenore as she gazed at my face, looking for signs of progress, “She looks just like …” And then there was nothing. She was gone again, into her mind.
I realize, now, where she was going. And I know, now, how cruel this all was. I should have known then. I’d seen her face stricken when Mr. Ben held up her dead sister’s hair. With the same unconscious cunning all young children possess around their mothers, I had devised the best way to get her attention—make her relive one of her most painful memories—the sick little-girl body, limp in bed, the small gasps for breath, the throat closing, the skin flushing from brown to a deep velvet and then emptying out into gray. What kind of daughter who loves her mother does something like that?
She worked on me all evening, and I would have been brought close to death all over again, from the sheer joy of that attention, if Lenore had not leaned over me while Mama was distracted and shook her head.
“Your mama is a saint,” she said, and the way she said it, I knew she knew what I had done. Lenore, who knew and saw all, saw all that Mama, with her big heart and big brain, could not see. I had acted so small. Lenore, God bless her, could see petty a mile away.
I could not meet her eye.
Saints have big enough hearts that they can care for the whole world. Their hearts are so large they dwarf normal people’s—and their hearts aren’t dumb like human hearts. It is stupid and selfish to ask a saint to use such an extraordinary organ solely on you, even if you are the saint’s daughter.
I did not get away with anything like the yarrow trick again for a long time. Even though, in shame at my audacity, it still occurred to me, many times, to try.
Another week passed. It was a too-warm spring that year. So hot we wished for the cold and gray of March. Our settlement was in a valley, not the fine, cooler tracts of land that the white people had reserved for themselves, and so it was always warmer in our town, we imagined, than elsewhere. Culver’s shop was even busier, with its pump out back, where we children liked to play at catching the final dribbles of cool, rusty water to rub on our tongues and splash behind our necks.
Mr. Ben liked the pump, too. He liked to sit out there, as the sun went down, before heading into Culver’s back room. By the pump, he was always mumbling that name, Daisy, turning it over and over in his mouth, a kind of lullaby he said to soothe himself, to encourage him to keep lifting one foot in front of another, without his woman by his side.
The boldest children used her name to rechristen him. I took this as a sign of hope—you knew a newcomer belonged to the to
wn when they got a nickname. The children called the new name after him at dawn, as he made his way to the wharves downtown, as he left all of us at Culver’s. They called it to him as he stood on Front Street, palming a penny before passing it to the woman with a rush basket full of eels and taking the slinking black coil down beneath the wharves, to cook over an open fire, because, as he loudly cried to anyone who would listen, he had no Daisy to cook it for him. They called it to him as he emerged from under the docks in the dusk, to venture out along the board, and look out across the angry gray river to Manhattan and softly whisper to his love across the stinking, cold, and unforgiving waves.
So by the time his sister Hannah came at the end of May, no one bothered to call him Mr. Ben anymore. Everyone called him Ben Daisy.
Miss Hannah came to us in the same coffin Ben Daisy did. The first time I saw her was when Lucien and Madame Elizabeth performed the same sleight of hand they had with him—set down the coffin, pried off the lid. But instead of a lifeless body, there was Miss Hannah, eyes shining bright, looking avidly up at us, her hands clutching a small, irregular yarn handkerchief to her chest. She sat up in the light immediately, put her free hand to her back and winced, and stretched out her other hand to Madame Elizabeth, handing her the piece of cloth.
“How I passed the time on the journey,” she said. “Took a line of yarn with me and weaved it the whole way.”
Mama looked very pleased at that, and Madame Elizabeth beamed. Miss Hannah was a steadier hand than Ben Daisy could ever hope to be.
Miss Hannah was impatient to see her brother, but Mama asked her to stay for a moment, to drink a cup of tea. “You’ll see him soon enough,” she said.
“But my brother,” she kept saying, even as she clung to Lucien’s arm, her legs still soft from lying down for so long. “He made it all right? He doin’ fine?”
Mama would only say, “I’ll take you to him.” Her voice was even, but she would not look Miss Hannah in the eye. I had never seen my mama ashamed of anything before, so I did not know to recognize it. I stayed close, eager to hear what Mama would say to Miss Hannah.
Libertie Page 4