We Hope for Better Things

by Erin Bartels

  To that end, she built a buffer around her heart and her person. She tucked all of the letters she had received from George into the hidden compartment in the trunk that had delivered him to her door all those years before. She wrote him no more letters and received none. She spoke to George through a proxy, whoever was handy at the moment. Often this turned out to be Little George. Each time she found herself tempted to think of George, she recounted to herself all of Nathaniel’s many good qualities—his forbearance, his bravery, his fortitude, his principles about the equality of all men, his gentle hand with his children. Bit by bit, Mary found that she could love him. Not with the obsessive love she had felt for George, but love nonetheless.

  The trip to Detroit was the first time their family had ever been alone together, without the company of the former slaves who had found refuge on their farm. Lacking a house full of people and problems to distract her, Mary discovered things about her boys she had not previously noticed. Her youngest, Benjamin, had taken to calling all adults by their first names as he did with the Negroes at home. Mary thought she might die of shame when he said to his grandmother, “Catherine, these are good biscuits, but not so good as the ones Mama Martha makes.” Jonathan said little at all. Salutations, pleases, and thank-yous were all he offered most of the time. George, on the other hand, had an opinion about everything, usually a critical one.

  As they loaded their luggage onto the back of the wagon for the trip home from the train station, Little George took one look at who was driving the horses and said, “Why are you here? Where’s Jacob?”

  Big George tucked a canvas over the top of the luggage and answered without looking at the boy. “Jacob’s gotten himself some poison ivy on his hands. Can’t control the reins until it heals.”

  Little George snorted his disapproval.

  “How dreadful,” Nathaniel said. “Where was it?”

  “Got it when he was out in the woods snaring rabbits.”

  During the ride back to the farm, Mary stared out at the countryside. With every passing year, more of the land came under cultivation. Trees were felled, fences built, furrows plowed. Acre by acre, the outside world was encroaching on her little kingdom. Nathaniel looked upon this progress as proof of God’s blessing. But to Mary, more people meant more criticism—and more danger. Every outsider who settled in the community was one more person to whom the Balsam way of life had to be explained and defended.

  Just a few weeks earlier, Little George had come home from a trip to town with Big George, hot, angry tears running down his cheeks. “Henry Rutherford called me a nigger lover! He said I’ve got their fleas! And he said you and Big George—”

  Mary clapped her hand over her son’s mouth in horror before he could finish that sentence and dragged him to the backyard, where she washed his mouth out with soap and whipped his bare backside with a razor strap.

  “I don’t care that you didn’t say it first,” Mary said through his howls. “We do not talk that way in this family.”

  Half a dozen farmhands looked on as Little George was thus humiliated. The boy didn’t speak to his mother for a week afterward, and ever since he had been more surly than usual with all of the farmhands, but especially with Big George.

  Always Mary had been careful to ask George and the others to attend to a task. Nathaniel, used to commanding enlisted men once he became an officer, tended to order the farmhands around. Little George had clearly picked up on this method and had taken to giving orders like a foreman.

  When the wagon rolled up to the house that evening, Little George jumped down and walked around to the driver’s seat. “Better get this all inside and then wipe down those horses, George.”

  “George!” Mary snapped.

  “I told you I want to be called Jack,” Little George said.

  “Your name is George,” Nathaniel said. “And you leave the orders to me, understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy mumbled. “Come on,” he said to his brothers. “We better get upstairs before Mother gives our beds away to more of them.”

  The two younger boys obediently followed their older brother up the front porch steps and inside the house.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Nathaniel said as he grasped one end of a trunk and Big George grasped the other. “I’m sure the lad is just tired after a long day of travel.”

  George nodded but said nothing.

  Later that evening, Mary raised her hand to the doorknob outside the boys’ bedchamber to kiss them good night. But Little George’s voice on the other side of the door made her pause. It was difficult to make out what he was saying.

  She opened the door. “What are you talking about in here?”

  All three boys looked to their mother in the doorway. Jonathan and Benjamin looked as if they had just been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. George was calm, and Mary wondered if that was the slightest hint of a smile she saw playing at the side of his lips.

  “Nothing, Mother. Just saying our prayers.”

  forty

  Lapeer County, December

  Tyrese waved to me through the window of the Roadhouse Diner as I pushed through the door and slid into the seat across from him.

  “Am I late?” I asked.

  “You’re fine.”

  “I wasn’t quite sure where this place was, and Nora’s directions were on the strange side. No street names, but a lot of landmarks that I’m thinking just aren’t around anymore. Except for going to the grocery store, she doesn’t seem to get out of the house much.”

  “My grandpa is the same way.”

  The waitress came to take our order. When she walked back to the kitchen, Tyrese was staring at me.

  “What?”

  “That’s a lot of food.”

  “I’m starving. I’ve been living on bread and water over there with the power out, and I’m making forty trips a day up and down the stairs with wood for the fire.”

  “Are you sure Nora’s okay alone?”

  “She’s all stocked up with wood, despite your warnings about ants. She should be fine for a couple hours.”

  The waitress slid hot coffees in front of us, and I wrapped my hands around mine. “That feels so good.”

  “I told you there are some churches open if it’s too cold.”

  “Don’t worry about us. We’ve got a house full of quilts, an entire tree to burn, and a little cold never hurt anyone.”

  “All right,” Tyrese said, rubbing his palms together vigorously. “Then let’s get down to what’s going on.”

  “I don’t really know where to start. I feel like you’re going to think I’m a horrible person.”

  “I doubt that. Just start at the beginning. Not like when you were born or anything, though I’d love to hear about that sometime. Just . . . start with what’s got you all upset.”

  I took a sip of coffee. “Right. Here’s the deal. I told you I used to work for the Free Press. Well, earlier this summer this old guy called me and asked me to meet up with him because he had something that he thought belonged to a relative of mine.”

  I filled Tyrese in on the details of that first meeting—the camera, the box of photos, the strange reticence on Mr. Rich’s part to confront Nora with them himself, the suspicious football player son.

  “You ate coney dogs with Linden Rich?” Tyrese said.

  “Yeah, well, that’s not really the point. Anyway, turned out that yes, I was related, and I got Nora’s information from my dad’s cousin who was all excited that I was going to visit her, and then she gave me the job of deciding whether Nora was just too old to live on her own anymore.”

  “Dang.”

  “Right? I mean, that’s not fair to me. I didn’t even know her.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “About Nora?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s kind of where these stories intersect. When I came to live with Nora, she kept mentioning this William fellow. She said he’d planted
the tree that fell down, that he tidied up the room I was going to stay in—which he didn’t—that he mowed the lawn—which of course we know is actually you. Sometimes she talks about him as if he’s long dead—she told me straight-out once that he had been gone for fifty years. And sometimes she talks like he’s still around, like if I walked into the next room, there he’d be. William was James Rich’s uncle. He’s the photographer who took the pictures of the riots that Linden Rich didn’t want to give me. But no one has ever come out and said he was dead, and my searching online turned up no death certificate.”

  Tyrese nodded. “I’m tracking with you.”

  The waitress came up with a tray full of food and commenced setting plates on the table. I was only a little concerned when the plates in front of me added up to four.

  Tyrese pounded on the bottom of a bottle of ketchup. “So do you think this William is still around somewhere?”

  “Maybe. My gut says it’s pretty unlikely, but I guess it’s possible. Nora said she didn’t know what happened to him, but at some point he left and didn’t come back. And at some point his darkroom in the basement was locked up.” I took a bite of scrambled eggs.

  “Why did he leave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why lock the darkroom?”

  “I have a theory about that. I found the key and I snooped around, and there were photos of a woman down there.”

  Tyrese talked around the food in his mouth. “A woman or another woman?”

  “See, that was my thought. Like maybe he was having an affair and left Nora? But I don’t know.”

  “She didn’t know about the pictures?”

  “I assume she doesn’t. I haven’t said anything about them. And when I confessed to her that I’d gone in there without asking, she didn’t ask what was in there. But she did say that she had locked it. She was talking about seeing things you can’t unsee or something like that.” I took a bite of hash browns. “I need to talk to Mr. Rich, don’t I?”

  “I don’t know. That depends. What do you intend to do with the information he might share with you? Assuming he even knows, are you going to tell your aunt what happened? And if you do, how can you be sure she’d want to know? What if William’s dead? What if he did run off with another woman? You want to be the one to tell her that?”

  “I guess it might depend on what he could tell me.” I dredged a piece of bacon in syrup and took a bite.

  “But if he knows what happened to William, wouldn’t he have told her already if they’re family?”

  “Maybe he’s tried before but she won’t talk to him.”

  Tyrese put down a forkful of eggs. “Okay, let’s say he knows what happened and she wouldn’t listen, so he tells you. Will she listen to you? And is it even something she needs to know at all? She’s an old lady. Maybe she should be allowed to die in peace.”

  “You think not knowing what happened to her husband is peace?”

  “Okay, maybe not.”

  I took a long drink of coffee. “Here’s what I want, Tyrese. I want her to be able to die with no unanswered questions, no regrets. I have a lot of regret in my life right now and it sucks. I can’t imagine how it would feel to have fifty years of wondering weighing on me. Something is going on with her, like she’s stuck somehow. She abandoned sewing fifty years ago because, according to her, she didn’t feel like it anymore. She stopped going to church. She rarely leaves the house, and she’s slipping mentally more often than she was even two months ago. We hardly even talk lately. She seems depressed. For all I know, she’s been depressed for decades. I’m hoping that knowing what happened to William could give her some closure.”

  Tyrese nodded. “I get it.”

  “So you think I should talk to him? Get the story, maybe even get him to bring the photos up and talk to her directly?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  We ate in silence for a minute as I debated whether I really ought to go into all the other stuff that had been bothering me.

  “You know,” Tyrese said, “you still haven’t told me anything so awful it would make someone want to cry. So, what else is going on?”

  I swallowed a bite of pancake and felt it catch a little on the way down. “I have a job interview in Detroit in a few days.”

  He stuck out his bottom lip a little and nodded. “Good for you.”

  “I probably won’t get it. I mean, I was fired from the Free Press.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “No, in this case it does.”

  I drained the last of my coffee, took a breath, and plunged headfirst into the events that made this extended trip to Lapeer County possible. I mostly avoided eye contact with Tyrese as I spilled my guts about my botched story, my deceptive relationship with Vic Sharpe, my ignominious exit. The few times I did venture a glance to see how he was reacting, his face was unreadable.

  When I had nothing left to say and nothing left to eat, Tyrese paid the bill and took my hand. “Hey, that’s all over and done. Maybe you’ll get this new job and move back to Detroit. Maybe you won’t. But all that business with that Vic guy, it’s done. Can’t change it. Can’t let it hold you back. And anyway, everything happens for a reason. Sometime soon, maybe you’ll look back on all that and see that it was the best thing that could have happened to you.”

  I smiled through tears of gratitude. “You’re amazing, Tyrese.”

  Outside we parted ways, Tyrese to more storm cleanup and snowplowing, I to restock Nora’s woodpile and prepare for my interviews—with both the Beat and Mr. Rich. As I headed down the road, my stomach lurched, protesting either the big greasy breakfast I had just consumed or my plans to meddle even deeper in Nora’s personal life when I’d always been taught to mind my own business.

  As the slate-gray clouds above began to shake out more snow, I told myself that it was my business. Nora was family, and I was there to help her. My parents didn’t stop at tending to the bodies of the people they served along the Amazon. They also tended to their souls. I could bring Nora firewood and wash the dishes and do the laundry—but couldn’t I also help to heal her broken heart?

  forty-one

  Lapeer County, August 1966

  “Are you starting on a new quilt already?” William asked when he walked into the parlor. “Seems like you just finished one.”

  “I can’t help myself. The Log Cabin quilt will be good for the second guest bedroom, but it just won’t work on our bed.”

  “What’s wrong with the one on our bed now?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems too stiff for that bedstead. Too straight and right-angley. That bed is so curvy and asymmetrical. I just feel like it needs something . . . different.”

  “What about that green and white one? The drunk one? That’s all curvy.”

  “Drunkard’s Path. It’s the wrong size.”

  “Okay, well, what do you have planned?” He pawed through her basket. “Just yellow?”

  “Yes, it’s going to be all different shades. When all the little hexagons are put together, they should look like a sunset.”

  “Dang. How long is that going to take you?”

  “At least fifty years.”

  He laughed. “Okay, baby. Looks good. Whatever you want to do. Though I did think that blue one was nice.”

  “It is. It’s just not right for our bed. And I wasn’t thinking of using it there. I just wanted to use up all those old shirts.”

  William shook his head. “See, I guess that’s good. It did kind of creep me out.”

  “Why?”

  “Those shirts were on dead slaves.”

  “Well, they weren’t dead or slaves when they were wearing them, according to Aunt Margaret. They just worked in them. I think the history is what makes the quilt special. If it weren’t for people like them, you’d have grown up in Alabama or Mississippi. Can you imagine that? We thought Detroit was bad.”

  “Come on, Nora. Not every black man in Detroit came from f
ugitive slaves. My daddy’s parents came from Georgia during World War I, and Mama came up with her mother from Tennessee during the Depression. So I would have been born in Detroit all the same, even without the men who wore those shirts.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “You never asked.” He glanced up at the ceiling. “Actually, my parents and grandparents would never talk about it much. But sometimes you’d catch them talking in real low voices—that’s when you knew to listen up. And then you’d wish you hadn’t spied because the next place you were going was bed. And you didn’t want to dream about all that.”

  Nora’s fabric and thread sat impotently in her lap. “What did they say?”

  “Never mind.”

  “William, that’s your family history, so it’s our family history. Our stories are one story from here on out.”

  “It’s not pretty.”

  “I’m sure it’s not.”

  William sat down and took a long breath. “Problem is, I really don’t know much for sure. There’s so little to go on. I know almost nothing about Mama’s family, and she’s still alive to talk about it. She just wouldn’t want to. And I could never ask her. Best I can figure from all the clues I’ve had over the years, her daddy got lynched.”

  Nora gasped.

  “Never could figure out why. But I don’t think they needed much of a reason. Just someone claiming you looked at a white woman or didn’t move off a sidewalk fast enough.”

  Nora felt sick to her stomach. It was one thing to know that lynching existed. It was quite another to have a family connection now with someone who had suffered that unthinkable fate.

  “I know more about my father’s father,” he continued, “because my Uncle Chuck knew the story and told it to me. Grandpa was a sharecropper in Georgia. Sharecroppers would only get paid once a year after the cotton was all harvested and sold. But my grandfather’s boss was always cheating, and lots of times he would tell the sharecroppers that they owed him money at the end of the season. That way he had a whole passel of slaves who weren’t really slaves but they actually were, you see?”