by Erin Bartels
Mary held Benjamin’s small red face in her hands. “Benny, Mama must go help with the barn, do you understand? I am going to leave you here with Mrs. Farnsworth and I will be back soon, okay?”
Benjamin immediately resumed full volume. The look of betrayal in his eyes was more than Mary thought she could bear. Suddenly, Little George and Jonathan tumbled into the room.
“George! Where is your father?”
“They’re all out back at the well with the pails. We saw the fire from the south field.”
“Stay with your brothers.”
She stood to leave. Jonathan dropped to the floor alongside his apoplectic younger brother and hugged him.
George hesitated. “Mother,” he said, “I didn’t know this was going to happen.”
“Of course you didn’t, George.”
“They never said anything about the barn,” he said as he choked back the first tears Mary had seen in his eyes in two years.
She gripped his shoulders. “What did you say?”
“They said they were just going to send them a message.”
“Who? Who was going to send a message?”
Mrs. Farnsworth burst back into the front hall. “Boys, give me a hand!”
Mary heard the shouts of men through the open kitchen door. Her eyes lingered a moment on her eldest son, then she rushed outside. Horses, cows, and pigs screamed. Chickens were running and flapping across the yard. Sweat-slicked men had formed a bucket brigade between the water pump and the barn. Flames climbed into the night sky like the devil’s grasping fingers. Mary looked around for a bucket and instead found the tortured features of a dead man. Sam. She could hardly hear her own screams for the noise.
“Mary!” Nathaniel’s voice cut through the chaos. He caught her up in his arms. Immediately her treachery in the forest rushed back to her. “Where have you been?”
“W-we had some trouble on the road. Jacob’s been hurt. George is—”
“There.” Nathaniel pointed to the line of men with their sloshing and ineffective buckets. “What happened?”
“An axle broke, and Jacob went to get the other wagon and never came back. We went after him and found him unconscious on the side of the road.”
She should have been there. Should have been home. Should have been faithful.
“Where is Benjamin?”
“The boys are all in the house. Oh, Nathaniel, what happened here? What happened to Sam?”
Nathaniel’s face was grave. “He is not the only one. I’ve counted two others—Jim and Theodore—and I don’t see Billy or Peter. This was no accident. Gordon said it was a group of men on horses with guns and torches. They may have caught Jacob along the road on the way here.”
“But who would do such a thing?”
“Someone who wanted to send a message.”
The old threat from Mr. Sharpe mingled in her mind with Little George’s cryptic words and rare tears. They had not been tears of fear like those of her youngest son. They were tears of regret. And when all had settled down and life had somehow returned to normal, if it ever could, she determined that he indeed would regret whatever part he may have played in this night of terror.
forty-six
Lapeer County, December
Christmas morning dawned clear and cold. With a crackling fire in the parlor and fresh coffee in the pot, I tried to grasp the promise of this most joyous of days. But the decision I’d made about taking the job at the Beat and the phone call from my parents I knew would soon come competed to see which could throw me into malaise the quickest.
Nora and I exchanged a couple gifts. A matching necklace and bracelet for her. A sweater and a book about drying herbs for me.
After a late breakfast I caught Matthew regarding the decorated spruce with interest. “Don’t you dare.”
He feigned innocence by licking a paw.
Nora came into the room with a large box. “I meant to give this to you earlier. I had a feeling this morning that I was forgetting something.”
“But you already gave me two presents.”
“Pah.” She motioned for me to sit on the settee. “Those were nothing special. This is what I wanted to give you.”
She sat in a chair across from me, her eyes alight with mischief. She was completely present, more like the woman who had met me at the door in August with a warm hug and a welcoming smile than the one last night, who had wondered aloud about when William planned to shovel the driveway.
“Can I open it?”
“What do you think I brought it out here for?”
I tore into the box and gasped. “Is this—is this a quilt?”
Nora smiled. “This is your quilt.”
“You made me a quilt?” I all but squealed. “That’s what you’ve been doing all this time?” I pulled it out of the box and began to unfold it.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry I’ve been so preoccupied. I wanted to get it done in time for Christmas. Recognize the fabrics?”
“I picked these out! You had me picking out fabric for my own quilt, you sneak!”
Nora laughed.
“Can we lay this out somewhere so I can see it all at once?”
“If we move the furniture there will be enough space here.”
“Let me get this coffee out of here first. I think I’d faint if it spilled on this.”
A few minutes later the coffee was safely in the kitchen, the furniture was hugging the walls, and Matthew was in another room sulking about the disturbance. We laid the quilt on the floor and stood back to admire it.
I put a hand to my mouth. “It looks just like the garden.”
“I’m so glad you can see it. It is your garden, not as it is now but as I think it will be in a year or two when your hard work is rewarded and all of the plants fill in. Sometimes it’s hard to see the end from the beginning. But good work and good soil will eventually bear good fruit.”
My eyes moved across the kaleidoscope of colors representing the pinks of roses, the violets of mint, thyme, and oregano flowers, the chartreuse dill, the silvery leaves of artemisia and lavender, the grays and tans of the pebbled pathways. In the center was a large circle of varied greens, and within the circle were two dark gray shapes. The gravestones.
“How did you even begin to design this?”
“I’ll admit it was a challenge to figure out how it would all go together. I drew it out on paper first, matched colors, started cutting, and hoped for the best.”
“Sounds like a true creation.”
She smiled at me. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
I traced the tiny quilting stitches. “It’s perfect.” I gave her a gentle hug. She felt so small.
“I don’t know if you’ll want that on your bed or not. I know you like the yellow one. But I thought if you did we might make you some new curtains to match it. They would be a good first sewing project for you.”
“For me? No. I don’t sew.”
“So you say, but once upon a time, I didn’t sew either. Everyone starts from square one, and I intend to teach you how to sew now that you’ve gotten the garden under control.”
“I don’t know. Did I ever tell you about the washcloth I knitted?”
“Sewing is nothing like knitting.”
I knew my face was betraying a serious dearth of enthusiasm. What Nora didn’t know was that she couldn’t teach me to sew when I was back in Detroit and she was tucked away in a nursing home.
She scooped up my hand and squeezed it. “Elizabeth, I’m getting old, and I have a house full of supplies and a list of faithful clients who will need to find a replacement once I’m gone. Why not just try it and see? You might fall in love with it. It just might be what you were meant to do. How are you going to know if you don’t take a chance?”
The phone rang.
“That’ll be my parents.” I escaped to the kitchen, grateful for the reprieve from Nora’s earnest eyes.
“Hi, Mom. Merry Christmas.” I peeked back in
to the parlor and then pulled the phone cord as far from the door as I could.
“So how are things going with Aunt Nora?” Mom asked after the perfunctory greetings. “Barb wrote and told us all about it, though I was hoping to get a letter from you . . .”
“It’s going pretty well. We get along, and I’ve been able to help her out quite a bit.” I relayed the story of the ice storm and the power outage and the hauling of all the firewood.
“Thank the Lord you were there for her!” Mom said. “I’m so glad God worked this all out.”
“Yeah, well, about the other thing, though.”
“Yes?”
I lowered my voice to just above a whisper. “Unfortunately, I think Barb was right. I’ve noticed it more and more the longer I’ve been here. She has these moments where she isn’t really in the present. She talks about people who aren’t here as if they are, and she gets confused.”
“Oh my. That’s such a shame.” The line was quiet as my mother passed this information on to my father. “So what would you recommend?”
“Me?”
“You’re the one who’s there and can assess the situation. Do you think she needs twenty-four-hour care?”
“Maybe not yet, but I think she will at some point soon.”
“Mm-hmm. And what are your thoughts on that? Is it something you can handle on your own?”
“Me?” I said again, a little louder this time. “I’m not a nurse.”
“It doesn’t sound like she needs a nurse. Just someone to lighten her load and keep her safe.”
“But, Mom . . . I kind of got a job offer. In Detroit.”
“Oh.” She let the word hang there. “And you’re taking it?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. My brain keeps telling me it would be stupid not to.”
“And what is God telling you?”
“He doesn’t . . . I just don’t hear him like you do. And anyway, if he’s supposedly orchestrating all of this, if I’ve been offered a job, doesn’t that mean I should take it?”
My mother was quiet a moment. “Sweetie, why do you think your father and I spent so long living in Detroit when we’d been called to the mission field?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just figured it was so I could go to a real school.”
She laughed. “You think the Detroit public school system was our top choice for you?”
“Uh . . .”
“Elizabeth, we had several opportunities to return to our mission work as you were growing up. But we stayed because we saw that there were needs close to home. We wanted to be there for Grandma as she battled breast cancer and for Grandpa as he dealt with diabetes. It’s not that we didn’t yearn to get back to fieldwork. And it’s not that doors to mission work weren’t opening. There’s no one right path that if you make the wrong choice you’re sunk. Whatever you choose to do, God can use that. Life is always a winding path. It’s only in retrospect that it appears to be a straight and inevitable one.”
“That’s not helpful, Mom. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have a choice.”
She laughed again. “But you do. So think hard, pray on it, and make that choice with open eyes.”
We chatted a little longer and they filled me in on the goings-on in the Amazon jungle. When I hung up the phone and walked back out to the parlor, the magnificent quilt still covered the floor. Nora sat staring at the Christmas tree and stroking Matthew’s head. Backlit by the light streaming in the window, her thinning white hair looked like it might blow away.
Everything I could see in this house and everything that still lay hidden from me—all of it would be gone without Nora, sold off to pay for her care. The antique furniture, the paintings, the quilts. Every plate, every book, every lamp would be sold to bargain hunters or thrown away. The graves would be reclaimed by the earth. The garden would succumb to weeds. The land would be sold off to developers. The cots would finish their days in a landfill. The trunk would be opened with a crowbar and its contents pawed through by strangers.
Worst of all, no one would know what had happened here. With no artifacts, there would be nothing left to spark the questions that had to be asked if the stories were to be told. The slaves who had risked their lives for freedom and found shelter beneath this roof would be forgotten. The women who had created such stunning quilts would be lost. The identity of the woman in the photographs in the darkroom would never be revealed. Nora was the last defense the past had against the relentless onslaught of time and decay.
And I was Nora’s last defense.
forty-seven
Lapeer County, July 1967
Two days and William still hadn’t called.
News was officially out on the disturbance in Detroit. Buildings were burning, stores were looted, hundreds of people had already been arrested, and rumors were spreading of rooftop sniping and police brutality. The National Guard had been called in, but the situation only deteriorated all the more.
Where was William in all this?
Nora picked up the phone, hesitated a moment, and dialed Diane’s number. They hadn’t spoken in years, but she was running out of options. It rang three times, four, five. Nora hung up. She knew who she needed to call. But she couldn’t. The last time she had seen her mother was when she had all but thrown her out of the house two years before.
She made herself dial. One ring. Two. Then Nora heard her father’s voice.
“Daddy? I need your help.”
“Nora? Nora, what’s wrong?”
“I—I need you to come pick me up.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the house in Lapeer. I need you to come pick me up right now, please.”
“Lapeer? What are you doing up there?”
“Mom can explain. Just please come get me. I have to get to Detroit.”
“You don’t want to come down here. Haven’t you seen the news?”
“William’s there and I haven’t heard from him and I’m afraid something happened to him.”
Silence. She hadn’t meant to say his name.
“Please, Daddy. Please.”
“Okay. But I’m bringing you back here to the house. You are not going to go out looking for that man in this.”
“Thank you.” She’d figure out how to look for William once she was there.
Nora packed two suitcases, one for her and one for William, then walked downstairs to wait on the front porch. By the time her father pulled up, she felt as if she might throw up from the potent combination of heat and anxiety.
Daniel Balsam climbed out of his black 1967 Corvette Stingray. Nora would not rush into his arms, no matter how much she needed someone to hold her up at that moment. Then he took a step toward her. The first step.
“Was that door always orange?”
“No.”
He looked at the two suitcases sitting on the porch steps. “Those aren’t going to fit. The smaller one might.”
“I didn’t know you’d be driving a Corvette.”
“I always drive a Corvette.”
She sighed. “Come in a minute while I figure this out.”
Nora laid the suitcases on the settee and began redistributing their contents.
“This is incredible,” Daniel said. “It’s exactly as I remember it.”
Nora snapped the smaller of the two suitcases closed again. “Did you spend much time here as a child?”
“Not much. My father never wanted anything to do with the place. But I went with my Uncle Ben and my cousins a few times.”
Daniel took the suitcase outside and shoved it into the small space behind their seats. “Barn still out back?” he asked as he pulled away.
“Yes.” Nora fiddled with the radio.
“You don’t need that. They don’t know anything. I can tell you that the city is going up in flames and the idiots are shooting at the firemen trying to put it out. They’re burning down their own neighborhood. They’re trying to get the Army called in, but that fool Cavanaugh will
have to do some serious politicking to get any help.”
Nora was quiet.
Daniel turned his attention to the road. “Where does his family live?” he asked.
“A few blocks from where it started. Twelfth and Seward.”
“Are they still there?”
“I hope not. William said his mother and sister were going to his aunt’s house.”
“Where is she?”
“Somewhere off Linwood. I don’t know.” Nora tried to read the side of his face. “Have you heard anything else?”
“All I know is that it’s a mess.”
She felt like he was holding back. But perhaps that was best. Knowing the extent of the destruction wouldn’t put her mind at ease. They were quiet for a few miles, but the air hung heavy with unanswered questions.
“How did you even meet this guy?” her father finally said.
“I already told you. Apparently you weren’t listening very well.”
“Or maybe something more important drove that information out of my head that day,” he said meaningfully.
Nora sighed. “I met him at an art exhibition. He’s a photographer. He takes very telling spontaneous portraits.” She gave him a harsh look. “Shows people as they really are, when they aren’t posturing.”
Her father nodded. “And photography is how he makes his living?”
“No. He works for GM in Flint.”
“In a factory.”
She hated that he assumed it. “He makes good money. We’re doing just fine.”
“No need to get defensive, I’m just asking. Just wondering how this guy managed to turn your head at all.”
“You’re so superficial, Daddy.”
“Maybe I am, but it’s not that. We raised you smarter than that. Why give up your family and your home and your car for a guy who works on the line and takes a pretty picture?”
She folded her arms across her chest. “You were the one who took all of that away. And anyway, not all his pictures are so pretty. That’s what got my attention at first. A certain photo he had taken of an angry businessman just a moment before he attacked him.” She saw his eyes narrow almost imperceptibly. “He told me that the man actually destroyed his camera.”