We Hope for Better Things

by Erin Bartels

  “You hot, Mrs. Balsam?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your face is all red, and your chest.” Loretta pointed to Mary’s chest, which was indeed flushed with her secret thoughts.

  “Maybe I am,” Mary said. “This baby gets so hot when he nurses. It’s as if I’m holding a big baked potato.”

  “I’ll nurse him for you a bit if you want. Give you a breather.”

  Loretta opened up the bodice of her dress again and sat down beside Mary. Mary broke the suction and handed the baby to Loretta, who had him resettled and suckling from her breast before he could even manage to get out a cry.

  Mary fanned herself with her hand. “Thank you.”

  The first time Loretta had suggested helping with nursing when the baby was just a couple days old, Mary had been shocked. Coming from the South where slaves routinely served as wet nurses for their masters’ children, Loretta found Mary’s strong response to her offer shocking as well. Then one night, as the baby was screaming and Mary herself had succumbed to tears of exhaustion, Loretta swept into her room and didn’t wait to be asked. She took the squalling infant from Mary’s arms and put him on one of her own full breasts. From that moment, Loretta and Mary became friends in the true sense of the word, rather than a desperate woman and her benefactress.

  Now Mary tried to recover from her runaway thoughts about George while her pale baby boy suckled at Loretta’s brown breast.

  “What was it like with Simon’s father?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you love him?”

  Loretta laughed. “Naw, I didn’t love that man. That man was a no-good, dirty rascal. He slept with all the girls. Had a whole passel a little half-breed children runnin’ round that plantation, pickin’ his cotton and servin’ his white children like they was royalty.”

  “Did he . . . force himself?”

  “On some, yeah. Rest of us learn it was better to just let him, just wait it out. Went better for you that way. Girls that fought back look like they been trampled by horses the next day. He was gonna get what he came for no matter what. I didn’t want to get beat, so I let him do his thing when he came to me. Once he knew a girl was pregnant, he was back most every night. Didn’t have to worry ’bout gettin’ you pregnant if you already was, so he stick with you till the birthin’ pains come. Then he move on.”

  Mary realized her mouth was hanging open and shut it. “How dreadful. That’s what happened to you?”

  “Twice. Year ’fore I had Simon, he got me with child, but it died.”

  Mary thought of her own dead baby girl in the frozen ground outside. “I’m so sorry, Loretta.”

  “I ain’t! I’s glad for the thing. When you dead you ain’t nobody’s slave. You reignin’ with Jesus then. And when I had Simon and he was healthy, I got out fast as I could. No child of mine gonna grow up a slave like I did, and for certain not in his own father’s fields.” Loretta pulled the now sleeping baby from her breast.

  Mary took her little son back into her arms as Loretta buttoned up her bodice. “Loretta, you amaze me. You all amaze me. I don’t know that I could have made the journey you did. I don’t think I would have had the courage.”

  Loretta regarded her. “I think you would, Mrs. Balsam. You got courage enough. Takes courage to do what you doin’ here.”

  Mary shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  “And it takes courage to give your heart away like you done.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You all in pieces, Mrs. Balsam. A piece of you is on the battlefield and a piece of you is in your little baby there and a piece of you is in all those letters you writin’ to George.”

  All Mary could manage was a breathy, “What?”

  “Don’t you worry,” Loretta said with a smile. “Your secret’s safe with me. I ain’t gonna tell nobody.”

  “But how did you know?”

  Loretta gave her a confused look. “I think you been mighty tired with your little bundle of joy here. Don’t you remember givin’ me that last one to read? You handed it right to me when I asked what you had in your hand.”

  Mary searched her memory. “I didn’t—I don’t think I meant to do that. No one else knows, do they? You didn’t say anything to George?”

  “’Course not. Ain’t none of my business anyway. I don’t know Mr. Balsam well, but from what I seen of him at Christmas, as far as I’m concerned he’s like every other white man I know.”

  “What do you mean? Wasn’t he kind to you?”

  “Oh, he’s kind, all right. But he ain’t no saint.”

  Mary’s mind raced. “Did he do something to you?”

  “Not me, Mrs. Balsam. Ain’t no man doin’ nothin’ to me no more I don’t want him to. I’d kill ’im first. But when I was comin’ back from town with Jacob one day, I seen Mr. Balsam comin’ outta that no-good Margaret’s house a shame.”

  Now Mary truly could not speak. A pitiful cry from the baby told her she was squeezing him too tightly. She came to her senses and loosened her grip.

  “I don’t mean to be spreadin’ no stories, so I ain’t said nothin’ to nobody. Jacob didn’t see it on account a he was facin’ front in the wagon. I was in the back facin’ where we come from. But I just thought maybe I’d tell you that so you don’t feel so bad ’bout lovin’ another man.”

  Mary felt sick to her stomach. “I think I need to go lie down.”

  Loretta stood when Mary did. “Mrs. Balsam, I’m real sorry. I shouldn’t a said nothin’ ’bout it. But the world is full of a whole lot of rotten people. You one of the good ones. You can’t help who you love.”

  Mary walked as if in a trance out of Loretta’s room and into her own, where she put baby George into his crib. She sat down in front of the portable writing desk she had moved into her room when her letter writing to George had become more intimate. In front of her, upon the leather-covered writing surface, was a blank piece of paper. She stared at it, unblinking.

  Could Loretta be telling the truth? Mary had never known her to lie. In fact, she was honest to the point of embarrassment. Perhaps she had just been mistaken and it was some other man. Mary tried to recall the faces of all the men she knew in town. So many were dead now. None of them could have been visiting a house of ill repute. So many others rarely emerged from their homes, deformed as they were from burns and amputations and disease.

  She thought back to the short days of Nathaniel’s furlough. They had made love the first night and the second, but with each new day she felt his growing judgment of her management of the household and farm. The third night they came together again, but her spirit was not in it. She had hoped he wouldn’t notice. But after that, they had not made love again until his last night at home. Had she driven him to a prostitute in the meantime with her coldness? Had he visited that Margaret woman and then come home and slept with her?

  At that moment, something snapped inside Mary’s brain. If Nathaniel could defile their marriage bed with no thought to the consequences, she would say precisely what she wanted to say to George without thought to the consequences as well. Hands shaking, she picked up her pen, dipped it in ink, and began to write.

  thirty-one

  Lapeer County, October

  Despite my fears, Nora did come through with the story behind the beds in the attic. In fact, she’d seemed more than happy to tell of the escaped slaves who had found refuge within the farmhouse walls. She’d begun as promised, and without further prompting, after dinner that night. It was indeed a long story—at least the way Nora told it—but I was captivated from the start. To think that some of those brave people had slept in my room, that their hands had worn smooth the same banisters that I touched every morning and evening.

  Lying in bed that night, I marveled at how little I knew of my own family. Did my parents know this incredible legacy? Surely they would have passed it on to their children if they had.

  Having finally gotten a real taste of the secre
ts my great-aunt was keeping in her head, I wasn’t satisfied with just the story of the beds. What about the trunk in the attic? What about the darkroom? What about William? I needed to learn the hidden history of this place before Nora was in the grave. If I didn’t, the stories would be lost—like those nameless bones in the garden marked by nothing more than a date.

  Plus I had a promise to keep to an old man with a box of old photos.

  But the very next day, Nora threw herself into her new project and asked for privacy as she worked on it. The request stung a little. Was I wearing out my welcome? I knew I would never have wanted a guest to stay more than one week, let alone six. I decided to give her space and spend a little more time and energy on me.

  Tyrese and I fell into a pleasant routine of hanging out a couple times a week. A movie on a Thursday night, a high school football game on a Friday, cider and donuts and a corn maze one Saturday, a barn sale on another.

  It was all good, clean, wholesome fun. Though I admittedly missed what Detroit had to offer—dining at the best restaurants, visiting posh casinos, or watching outstanding performances at the Fox Theatre. So late one night as I talked to Tyrese on Nora’s kitchen phone, twisting the cord around my finger as I had when I was thirteen, I suggested we go to Flint one evening for a performance of Ragtime at The Whiting.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never go to Flint if I can help it.”

  “Why not? It’s not as bad as the media makes it out to be. Same as Detroit. Some spots you want to avoid, but there are some cool things going on in Flint.”

  “It’s just not my scene,” he answered. “Not my people.”

  I wanted to argue with him. Lapeer people weren’t his people. I was struggling to know what to say when I realized that my silence had said volumes to Tyrese.

  “Just because I’m black doesn’t mean I fit in in Flint,” he said. “Or Detroit. Or at a showing of Ragtime.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yeah you did. You didn’t, but you did.”

  “I really didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay. I know you didn’t.”

  “Well . . . why don’t you come over here for dinner? I’m sure Nora would love to have you, and it might get her out of her cave.”

  So he did. And Nora did indeed come out of her cave—and her shell. Tyrese had an uncanny ability to talk with her and asked all of the questions I’d been afraid to ask for fear of shutting her down or tipping my hand.

  “Elizabeth tells me you’re from Detroit but you’ve lived here since the sixties,” he said as he cut into a pile of mashed potatoes with the side of his fork. “Tell me about that. Why’d you move way out here?”

  “There was no place for us in Detroit,” Nora said matter-of-factly.

  I risked entering the conversation. “There wasn’t any housing?”

  “Not for us. No one would rent to us in decent parts of town. And I didn’t want to stay anyway. I was disowned by my family when we got married. Not long after, we moved out here and sort of retreated from life, I guess.”

  “Why didn’t your family want you to marry him?” Tyrese asked.

  “Because he was black.”

  It was the answer I expected, but to hear it stated so baldly was still a shock to my system. I looked to Tyrese, expecting to see an expression of disbelief. But he was unsurprised and nodding.

  “It was not unheard-of,” she continued, “but it was certainly not considered acceptable, especially for a young woman of my station in life. So we moved out here to escape the dirty looks and rude comments and redlining in Detroit. We had four beautiful years together. And then it ended.”

  Four years? That was it? “What happened?” I asked.

  She furrowed her brow. “I don’t really know.”

  I didn’t know either. I could find no death certificate on Ancestry.com. And now that I thought about it, Mr. Rich never actually said his uncle had died.

  “Is he . . . alive?”

  She shook her head. “Some days I can believe he is.” Then she was quiet.

  Tyrese looked at his watch. “I better get going.”

  He was on his feet and at the kitchen door before I realized he meant to leave. I started to stand up.

  “Don’t get up.” He pointed meaningfully at Nora, whose head was down. “I know my way out. Thank you for the wonderful dinner.”

  I mouthed thank you, and he smiled and disappeared, leaving Nora and me to talk about what I’d been dying to talk about.

  “Nora, is that William’s darkroom in the basement?”

  I couldn’t quite read her expression, but I was able to rule out pleasantly surprised.

  “How do you know about the darkroom?”

  I took a deep breath, feeling very much like I had as a child when my parents caught me in a lie. “I hope you won’t be upset with me. When I cleaned out the dresser in my room, I found a key in the bottom drawer. I should have brought it to you right away. I saw the door when I was getting tools to work on the garden. I wanted to talk to you about it, but I didn’t think I could because I’d gone in there without asking. But then when you started talking about William, I thought . . . I know this is weird and morbid, but I wanted to ask you about it while you could still tell me the story behind it.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “You mean before I’m dead?”

  “Or senile,” I offered weakly, as if that were better.

  She gave me a long look. “Well, my natural reaction would be to tell you to mind your own business.”

  My heart sank.

  “But I guess you’re right,” she went on. “We’re only given so much time on this earth, and though there are some things I think we all take to our graves, I guess your own family history shouldn’t be one of them. I had a great-aunt of my own who was kind enough to share much of the history of this place with me—she’s the one who told me about the former slaves who used to live here. I shouldn’t begrudge you the same courtesy.”

  I felt my heartbeat tick up. “So is that where William worked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did he lock it?” I thought of the photos of the gorgeous young woman and feared I knew the answer.

  “He didn’t. I did. I locked it the week after he left. I left the key upstairs in the bottom of my dresser so that if I ever got up the nerve, I could open it. Only I never did.”

  “Why not?”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Once you see something, you can’t go back to a time when you hadn’t.” She shook her head. “You can never go back.”

  What did she think was in there? Did she suspect what I did?

  “How did you know he was a photographer, anyway?” she asked.

  Here goes nothing.

  “Because I have something of his that I need to give you.”

  thirty-two

  Lapeer County, November 1964

  “Shoot!” Nora winced and sucked at her finger.

  “Don’t bleed all over that thing, now you found it,” William said as he walked into the parlor, camera in hand.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m not sure it would be noticeable anyway.”

  “Maybe not. What do you call that thing again?”

  “A crazy quilt.”

  He nodded. “That’s the truth. That thing is crazy ugly.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  William snapped a picture of her incensed expression. “Yes it is. Nothing matches. The pieces are all jagged. There are little spiders on it. It’s crazy.”

  “Exactly.”

  He laughed a little. “Whatever. But that isn’t going on our bed, is it? I like the red and white one you made better.”

  “No, it isn’t going on our bed. But I thought if I could fix it up I could maybe use it somewhere.”

  “You mean somewhere I never go, right? Because that’s going to send me into spasms if I look at it too long.”

  “Shut up.” She laughed as she lobbed a spool of thread at him.

&n
bsp; “Missed.”

  “Shut up about that too. And go get it for me.”

  He fished the thread out from under a chair. “Listen, I’m going to be downstairs awhile, okay? You call me when dinner’s ready?”

  “Sure, such as it is.”

  “You make a mean meat loaf, baby. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

  He planted a long kiss on her lips, looked ready to change his mind about leaving, then waved the desire away and disappeared. Nora heard his footsteps diminish then vanish altogether when he hit the dirt floor of the cellar. A squeak. The muffled sound of a door shutting. Then she was alone.

  She tied the thread and snipped off the excess. Then she sat back and assessed her work. The open seam was now shut, her tiny stitches hidden beneath the embroidered bird tracks that some ancestor of hers must have made long ago. She smoothed her hand over the quilt, looking for the next part needing repair. She had been taking in mending for months to earn some extra cash, but she hadn’t found any of those projects as satisfying as this one.

  They had discovered the quilt the night before, which was a great surprise indeed. Having been at the farmhouse over a year, Nora was sure that its secrets had all been revealed, even if they could not be explained. She had not counted on the trunk, and in fact had all but forgotten the skeleton key her mother had included in the envelope when she and William moved in. It didn’t seem to open anything, so it went into a kitchen drawer and inched its way to the very back corner beneath the pot holders. When they found the trunk hidden beneath a sheet, back behind the very last mysterious cot in the attic, William had suggested a crowbar. Thankfully, Nora remembered the key.

  “What is that?” William had said.

  “It’s a quilt,” Nora said reverently. “Oh my.”

  They unfolded it gently, each holding two corners. It hung heavy between them like a giant mosaic bowl.

  “We need to take this downstairs.”

  William craned his neck. “Anything else in there? Pirate gold? Maybe some big ol’ bags of money from a bank robbery or something?”