by Erin Bartels
The car began to accelerate. She pushed a little further.
“It so happens that I recognized the man in the photo, and I didn’t think the photographer should have taken it, much less displayed it, so I offered to buy him a new camera in exchange for it. It’s funny, you know? If that man hadn’t smashed his camera, I never would have talked to him in the first place.”
“I see,” he said stiffly. “And what did you do with this picture?”
“I still have it.”
He turned toward her. “What?”
“Daddy! The road!”
He swerved back into his lane. “Why wouldn’t you have destroyed it?”
“Because I wanted to keep looking at it.”
“Why?” he practically shouted.
She wheeled on him now. “At first I was trying to find something that would prove it wasn’t you. And when I finally accepted that it was, I kept looking at it so that the hate I saw in your eyes for the man I love would become hatred in my heart for you, so that it wouldn’t feel so horrible to have been thrown out of my own family.”
He cursed under his breath.
“You asked,” she said.
“I’m sorry I did.”
Nora shrugged and turned to look out the window. For several minutes, all she could hear were the tires on the road and the thrum of the V8.
“I’m not proud of that moment,” Daniel finally said. “I lost my temper on an already bad day, and I took it out on him because it was convenient.”
“Would you have done the same thing if he’d been white?”
“I’m not going to play that game. What’s done is done. I can’t go back in time and change it.”
“If you could go back in time—”
“Nora—”
“If you could, would you have thrown me out of my apartment, taken my car, and kicked me out of your life? Was that just a bad day you were taking out on me?”
Daniel stared straight ahead.
Nora looked hard at him. “Daddy, what did you mean when you said that black people ruined this family?”
forty-eight
Lapeer County, June 1874
Chest heaving, Mary looked down to the end of the bed, hoping that Anna, the midwife, and Mrs. Farnsworth would announce that the baby who had just emerged into the world was a girl. But instead of smiles and tears of joy, she was met by wide eyes and slack mouths.
Mary pulled herself up into a sitting position. “What? What’s wrong?”
Mrs. Farnsworth covered her mouth and sat down heavily in a chair.
Mary was frantic now. “What?”
“The baby is fine and healthy,” Anna began. “It’s only . . .” She trailed off and lifted the squalling infant up, allowing Mary a clear view.
Mary emitted an almost inaudible gasp. The child had light brown skin, a wide nose, and tightly curled black hair.
“But—how?” she managed.
“I’m sure you’re the only one who can answer that question,” Mrs. Farnsworth said.
Anna hastily swaddled the baby and brought him up to Mary’s chest. “Put him on your breast to stop his crying.”
“But I—” Mary began.
“Quickly!” Anna commanded. “Unless you want your husband to hear it and come running to see what is clearly not his child.”
Mary did as she was told and the baby’s crying ceased. She hardly dared make eye contact with the two women who now looked upon her as what she undeniably was—an adulteress. Her sin had found her out, and now her husband would be shamed, her children mocked, her marriage shown to be a farce.
Now more than ever the community around her would turn on them. She thought grimly of the graves they had dug last October, of the six large stones that had been taken from the wall at the end of the drive and dragged by oxen, one by one, to the heads of each grave to mark the spot. Was such a fate to await this poor bastard child? What might Mr. Sharpe and his thugs do to George? Mary knew in her heart that it was she who had seduced him—practically begged him to commit this sinful act. Yet he would be the one to bear the blame—and the punishment.
Anna’s voice drew Mary back into the moment. “This is what we will do. Yesterday I delivered the baby of that prostitute on the outskirts of town—Margaret. I told her I would find a place for the child.”
“No, no,” Mary pleaded. “No, I—”
“I take this baby boy with me today and you stuff your dress, make it look as though you were not yet delivered. Mrs. Farnsworth, tell Mr. Balsam it was a false alarm and the baby is not yet born, but that Mrs. Balsam must remain in bed, undisturbed. Meanwhile, I’ll get the baby I delivered yesterday—”
“No!”
“—and tomorrow at nine o’clock you will send for me. I’ll give the baby whiskey to keep her quiet and bring her in the same basket I use to take this baby out. Then Margaret’s baby will be yours and no one beyond the three of us will know.”
Mary could hardly believe what she was hearing.
Mrs. Farnsworth stood. “I’ll get a basket and some blankets straightaway.” She rushed from the room, shutting the door behind her.
“Anna, I will never—”
“You will, my dear. Because if you don’t, you will have destroyed your entire family, past, present, and future.”
“But you don’t understand. Nathaniel has been with that—”
“Mr. Balsam is not the issue here,” Anna said. “You are. Now then, the moment this baby falls asleep, I’ll take him out of here.”
Mary gripped the child tighter. “What will happen to him?”
“I haven’t figured that part out yet. But this at least will save your family from public shame. I’ll find a suitable home for him, I promise.”
“But couldn’t I find a Negro woman to come work for me and pretend the baby is hers? Then I could—”
“Mrs. Balsam, get ahold of yourself! This is the only solution to your problem. You’re lucky this other woman’s baby looks enough like you and Mr. Balsam that the switch might possibly go undetected. And even if someone did suspect, it would be better to be suspected of philandering with a white man than a Negro.”
Mrs. Farnsworth swept in with a large basket filled with blankets, a bottle of whiskey, and an eye dropper.
“I thought it best if we gave this one something as well, Anna. He cannot make a sound as you leave.”
Anna reached for the baby lying contentedly against Mary’s chest.
“Please, wait,” Mary entreated through tears. “Just for a moment. Please.”
“It will only make it harder, Mrs. Balsam.” She dipped her finger in the whiskey and pried the little mouth from Mary’s breast. He sucked Anna’s finger as she quickly transferred his swaddled body to the basket. Mary bit her fist to keep from crying out. Mrs. Farnsworth dripped whiskey into the corner of his mouth with the dropper. The baby soon relaxed, stopped suckling, and fell asleep.
Mary’s thoughts raced to search out some other plan, some other way. Anna covered up the basket and peeked into the hallway, then she and the basket disappeared. Mary thought she might hyperventilate. She heard Little George’s voice in the hall and her heart froze. Then Anna’s muffled voice. Then nothing.
Mary let a quavering breath leak out from between her lips. Gone. Her baby. George’s baby. Gone.
The next few minutes were a blur. Mrs. Farnsworth cleaned her up, changed her bedding, and helped her stuff her dress.
“I’ll keep everyone out of here,” she said. “This would only convince someone from the doorway if you remain under the covers.”
At nine o’clock the next morning, Mrs. Farnsworth sent the children away, told the men to stay out in the field, and sent the young stable boy rushing for the midwife again. Anna carried the same basket. The baby inside was a small girl with light reddish-brown hair and blue eyes who had no idea that she was a trick being played on the world. The child did look remarkably like Nathaniel, a thought that made Mary retch. The man who had
fathered this child likely lived nearby, perhaps with a wife and legitimate children of his own. Like Nathaniel. She tried to comfort herself with the thought that at least the poor little girl would not be raised by a prostitute. But how could she stand in judgment? At least a prostitute did not hide her sin.
“You will have to pretend you are in the travail of labor until this baby is awake enough to cry,” Anna said. “If no one hears anything from this room, no one would believe you had just borne a child.”
Mary wondered how much dignity she would have to forfeit to cover up her transgression. “I can’t do that with you both in here watching me.”
“I’ll sit watch outside the door,” Mrs. Farnsworth offered.
“I must stay,” Anna said.
Mary closed her eyes to shut Anna out, to shut the world out, and began to groan. It felt at first as though she were an actress playing a part in a sordid play. But at some point, her cries of agony became genuine. She cried out for her impossible love, for her betrayal of her husband, for his betrayal of her, for her selfishness, and for the baby who had been stolen from her. In her sorrowful moans were all the words she felt she could not utter aloud before God or man, her full confession and cry for forgiveness. Finally her cries were joined by the mewling whimpers of that pitiful baby in the basket, and the deception was complete.
Nathaniel came in first, smiling and cooing over the tiny baby girl upon his wife’s breast. “What shall we call her?”
“You name her,” Mary said flatly.
Nathaniel thought a moment. “What about Margaret?”
“What?”
“Margaret.”
“How can you even suggest that?” Mary realized she was glaring at him, but she couldn’t stop. How could he propose the name of the woman whose bed he had visited instead of her own?
“What do you mean?” he asked. “What’s wrong with Margaret?”
“The only Margaret in this town is not fit to speak of. And don’t think I don’t know why you chose that name.”
Nathaniel’s eyes clouded over with anger, a sight made more terrible for its rarity. “You would sit in judgment of me? You, who named our firstborn son after a slave? A slave you wished would ravish you all the time I was picking worms from my rations so I could maintain some ghost of my humanity?”
The letter. He had gotten the letter.
“This baby’s name is Margaret,” he said. “And her middle name shall be Catherine. And we will never speak of these things again. Do you understand?”
Mary nodded and whispered, “Yes.”
Nathaniel schooled his features, tugged at his cuffs, and left the room.
Jonathan and Benjamin came in next, smiling over their new baby sister. Benny especially took a shine to her and would not leave until Mrs. Farnsworth suggested that there were cookies down in the kitchen waiting for him.
Little George came last. He looked at the baby with an expression bordering on contempt, and he would not look at his mother at all.
Their relationship had been even more strained than usual since the night of the attack. Not wishing to bring shame to the family, Mary had kept her suspicions of his involvement to herself. Instead, she developed her own personal system of justice, meting out punishments for every small infraction, assuming the boy would know why, even if she didn’t exactly.
“Don’t you like your little sister?” Mary said.
“Not my sister,” he mumbled.
Mary’s mouth fell slightly open, and beads of sweat began to sprout from her upper lip. “Of course she’s your sister.”
Her eldest son’s stormy expression was a mirror image of his father’s not twenty minutes before. “I’m not stupid, Mother.” Then he turned and walked out of the room.
forty-nine
Lapeer County, December
“Thanks for doing this,” Tyrese said. “I know it’s not the way most people want to spend New Year’s Eve.”
“We’re glad to help,” Nora said, patting his hand. “Stop acting like you pulled us away from some glittering party somewhere. This is Lapeer, not New York.”
“I know, I know. But most people wouldn’t want to work on spreadsheets and order forms any old day, let alone a holiday.” Tyrese turned to where I sat drowning in plant and seed catalogs. “And this isn’t the most romantic place to ring in the New Year.”
Nora gave me a knowing look and then went back to following lines of minuscule text with a magnifying glass. Tyrese turned back to his computer screen. I went back into the shell of private misery I’d been living in for the past ten days. Tomorrow I was supposed to call Marshall Boon to tell him whether or not I would accept his generous job offer.
The big clock on the nursery’s office wall kept cruelly ticking off the minutes I had left before I’d have to tell Nora and Tyrese of my decision. I was powerless to stop it. I’d spent much of my life in high gear, wishing clocks and people would hurry up. Now there was almost nothing I wouldn’t do to slow time down.
When I’d gotten Tyrese’s call a few hours before, I’d actually jumped at the chance to get out of the house and help him play catch-up. His father had been down with acute tonsillitis for a week, leaving Tyrese to cover all of their plowing customers on his own. He hadn’t had time to finish their orders for the coming season, and the end-of-year deadline was bearing down on him.
“Would you mind if I brought Nora?” I’d said.
He’d hesitated just a moment before saying, “Of course not. With three people we just might finish before midnight.”
“Oh, it will take that long? She usually goes to bed pretty early.”
“No problem. If she wants to get some shut-eye, we can just set up the couch in the break room for her. A couple years ago we had an employee sleeping on it for a week after her parents kicked her out of the house. It’s really comfortable.”
Nora and I arrived at Perkins Nursery at 6:30 p.m. with a pizza and got to work, matching Tyrese’s scribbled notes to products, reading item numbers out loud, and checking species off lists while he maneuvered through order forms from a dozen different vendors.
As 8:30 p.m. rolled around and Nora began making mistakes, she decided to call it a night. Tyrese retrieved some bedding from a cupboard and lost himself once more in catalogs as I spread blankets and fluffed pillows.
“This is better anyway,” Nora said as she took off her reading glasses and settled in under the covers. “No one wants a third wheel on a night like this.”
“A night like what?” I snickered. “We’re ordering fertilizer and seed packets, not slow dancing in front of a roaring fire.”
Nora shook her tired head slightly. “Real romance happens when you least expect it. That’s what makes it romantic. I fell in love with William on a couch very much like this one after I’d embarrassed myself at an awkward lunch, made thoughtless comments about his neighborhood, and tripped on the sidewalk and bloodied my knee. I did everything wrong.”
I smiled. “My mother would say everything happens in God’s time, I guess.”
“Maybe.” She shut her eyes. “But if God had asked me anything about it, I would have told him he was mistaken.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“William was the right man, all right. But it was the wrong time, that’s all. Good night, Elizabeth.”
“Good night.”
I shut off the light, closed the door, and leaned heavily on the other side of it. Was she right? Did God get things wrong? Did his clock and our clocks just not match up, like how the clock in my car was four minutes faster than the one in the kitchen? Whose clock was Marshall Boon’s job offer running on?
Tyrese and I pounded out the remaining orders over the next few hours until there was only one left. I looked at the clock. 11:29 p.m.
“We’re going to make it,” I said.
“Yep. I just gotta run through to the back greenhouse a minute and double-check how many seed geraniums I already have planned.”
“I’ll come with you. I need to get out of this chair.”
“Grab your coat.”
We walked through the front showroom, the gardening equipment room, and the front greenhouse, flicking on each light as we went. The back greenhouse was where seasonal workers prepped seed trays and planters, where thousands of tiny brown seeds swelled and split and became tiny green plants that would be offered to customers starting in April, even though the last freeze date for the region was in late May.
Clipboard in hand, Tyrese counted off the trays of seed geraniums, his finger punching the air in front of him, the mumbled numbers adding up under his breath. My boots scuffed along the soil-strewn floor, leaving trails of bare concrete behind me like the gravel two-track drive that had first led me to Nora’s doorstep back in August. The chill air smelled of promise, of gardens that would soon be planted and watered and tended.
I thought of my own little plot of land, the garden I had worked so hard to renew. Of Nora’s beautiful quilt. Of Mary’s silent grave. Mute testimonies of our family’s story, a story I had known nothing about until just a few months ago. A story I was in the middle of right now.
If everything really happened for a reason, then I must have lost my job at the Free Press so that I would be free to come to Nora’s—to deliver Mr. Rich’s photos, to assess Nora’s independence for Barb, to help her through the ice storm. But that was all for other people. Was the Beat God’s way of telling me my work here was done? Was any part of his so-called plan for me?
I watched Tyrese scratch notes onto his clipboard as breath streamed from his lips in a white cloud.
“Don’t stay in Lapeer for me or even for Nora if what you really want to do is be a journalist.”
His heavy shearling-lined leather coat was marred by a year’s worth of dirt from transferring living things from one place to another.