A Reckoning

by Linda Spalding

  Eva Nell was eighteen that summer and he was eleven. She lived in a house on the cusp of Lake Ontario, a house with its boards beaten by wind and ice while ships rode by on waves that crashed like cannon fire and now Ross had come to Virginia to satisfy his need for action against slavery. And perhaps to solve a mystery for Eva Nell.

  2

  Martin’s way home from the revival was through dense woods that abutted corn and cotton fields. He knew the path by feel and he could whistle and sing and spit without much fear. He could cuss if he had to. His father said that the woods were unclean. They harbored dangerous, unreasoning beasts. In any part of nature, it was important to exercise reason. But Martin felt tempted by the privacy of wilderness, where he could unbutton his trousers and feel the air on his tenderest skin. Such were his pleasures and now he got down in a crouch and made a turd on the narrow path. What would the angel think of that? A message to the other beasts. Maybe that Northern man was behind him, finding his way along in his feathered hat. He rubbed himself with a dry leaf and made a whoop to try its effect. He moved across a piece of land that knew the footsteps of its earlier inhabitants and he thought of them. When he came to the field behind his uncle’s big house, he skirted it widely in order to miss the cabin where his father might be talking to God after the long hours of preaching. Man to man was the way his father talked to God. Martin thought about the angel again. Why did Jacob hang on to it? Why was he wanting to be blessed? Had he done something bad? I will not let thee go except thee bless me, is what Jacob said. Martin thought of old Reuben muttering, Bless my soul, well, bless my soul, and he knew it wasn’t the same.

  He could ask his father about it, but that would entail another lecture to be followed by a beating since he had run off without permission after the camp meeting. He could ask his brother about the angel but Patton would tease him. He could hear Patton’s voice without even trying. Is Patton the same as me, Martin wondered, when it comes to being crumply? He didn’t think so. He thought Patton was superior and not afraid of their father, who was himself not afraid of anything save the Lord’s earned wrath. But the Lord couldn’t make a bruise on your arm or a lash mark on your leg, or box your ears, which meant their father was harder than God and thinking about it made Martin feel crumply again. I’ll get a beating for leaving Mam and the girls, he thought, but I don’t care one heck about it. He said the word out loud to himself.

  Sunday supper included cold meat and suck-eyes with collard greens and sometimes rice pudding and because he was hungry Martin decided to go home and face the beating and he even hurried a little until he reached the cornfield behind his own house. It was the acre he plowed up every spring – riding on the plow to level it – and he could already see the corn coming in as he jumped across the rows he’d made. They were straight as string this year and maybe his father would not be in a bitter mood if the collection bowl was full from the meeting and there would be rice pudding.

  3

  The preacher was sitting in the cabin his own father, Daniel, had long ago built. Since the old man’s death a year ago, this place had become John’s harbor. He came here to sit on a chair his father had made. He came to write on the table his father had constructed so that his family could gather to eat when they first came out of Pennsylvania to escape the scorn of his community. Daniel, a widowed Quaker, had married a young Methodist named Ruth Boyd. Now Daniel’s son by Ruth sat at the old table when writing sermons or bills, and this time it was a bill of sale and a letter to his half-brother, Benjamin. He should not work on the Sabbath but he managed Benjamin’s business, selling cotton as well as flax and cider and the brandy he distilled. John had no day of rest. Had he not given his heart to his gathered congregation that very day? Wasn’t exhortation a form of labor? And wasn’t his pastoral income too scant to keep a family housed and fed? He recorded accounts for Benjamin’s farm and was paid a percentage of the profits. In my father’s house there are many mansions. It was John’s bitterest joke. His father had created wealth and John’s older half-brother had transferred it all to himself while John and his wife and children lived with a Christian minimum of worldly goods. You see, he said to the ghost of his father, I am my brother’s keeper. He stared at the fireplace as if a waft of paternal affection might be smoldering there in spite of Benjamin’s lifelong wastefulness. The problem had been there for years – an inclination to buy and trade and sell and, what is worse, an attitude of Devil may care regarding the outcome. There was, first, the Mill and Comfort House, given to Benjamin by their father in order to keep him home from the war in 1812. There, Benjamin made his profits and drank his own brandy and challenged travelers to games of chance. There, the gristmill built by their father – the small but steady business that had first given them hold on Virginia soil – became a venture too small for Benjamin’s greater talents. This because, while Daniel had been content to copy the simple waterwheels he’d seen in Pennsylvania, Benjamin wanted a gravity wheel fed by a sluice. He wanted a saw frame and sliding carriage to hold logs rather than grain and with them he turned out floorboards for the brick house he forced his slaves to build. Benjamin’s first wife, Elizabeth, had come to the marriage with two black men as her dowry and Benjamin had soon purchased more. Wives were found for them. Babies were born. John tried to remember the various histories, but most of them didn’t have stories that he could know. Rakel had suffered a mysterious illness that rendered her useless, but Elizabeth had allowed her to stay because her sale would not bring any profit. Josiah had come a few years back from an auction near Rosehill. Abe. Jule. Young Jim was the newest. Nick was born on the property to a woman who was later sold.

  It should all have been sufficient but Benjamin took on loans from the Jonesville Bank. And when Elizabeth died, he married a girl who would not be satisfied with life on his farm and he took more loans. There were payments due every season and now, after a long, dry winter, they were low on cash.

  As a circuit-riding preacher, John was accepted whenever he threw up a tent, but sales and bookkeeping suited him just as well. He was, in spite of his mystical leanings, fastidious with accounts. Of course this served his interests, but there was also the pleasure of numerical balance. Today, along with the bill of sale for cider, he composed his monthly statement for Benjamin. He wrote these letters in order to impress on his half-brother the facts of their finances, which might otherwise be deposited in a column called Denial. Dear Brother, he wrote, It is my duty to inform you that you are required to make a court appearance on May 5 unless payement is made on the bank loan. Money must be found before the day in court, so I ask you to have care where expenses are concerned. We must improve the output of the workers and repay our debts. Here John laid his quill aside and sat looking at the wall for several minutes. It was so familiar to him, this log wall, that he could use it as a mirror of sorts, a means of introspection. How had he and Benjamin come to such mutual dissatisfaction? Their father had no brook with slavery after his purchase of a young boy ended in tragedy. But a lack of workers meant that his land earned no profit and he finally gave or sold it at a loss to Benjamin, who was born of Rebecca, Daniel’s first and beloved Quaker wife. Benjamin was the favorite and now John picked up the quill and finished his letter. Apparently with our father’s passing, the bank has lost trust in timely repayment. We must remedy this. Your brother, John

  Counting himself the original sinner by purchasing so much land, Daniel had retired to his cabin and closed the door behind him. It was possible that Benjamin had housed his workers in his cellar so as not to irritate his father by building quarters that were visible, and now there was no end to the discussions in Jonesville of that unwholesome practice, which was an embarrassment to John.

  The one exception was a small cabin placed a good distance from the barn, where it was not much noticed. This habitation had its own tiny plot of land with a few stalks of corn and a chicken nesting on a pile of hemp bags and now John got out of the chair and knelt on the flo
or in order to feel the spirit of the Lord and to pray for the patience he needed to stay away from that little house, and from the barn, although it was nearly milking time, when Emly would be alone with the cows. Sabbath is Sabbath but thirst and hunger do not disappear on the Lord’s holy day. Milk does not dry up and cows must still be tended. Life in a barn is separate from life in a house. The same rules do not apply. In the sweet reek of hay, a man can be ardent as he is nowhere else and love the webs that hang in the stalls and the light that eases through the cracks and the woman who lies down with him amid the cows and horses and mules and the flight of the swallows tearing in and out and, beyond the roof, a hawk screaming dutiful warning. John stared at the log wall again, mirror to his shame. It had begun when he’d gone to the barn one morning to saddle his horse and had come upon his brother’s milkmaid with her brimming pail and her face with its features defined by the early light that came pouring so generously through the wide-open door. Her mouth that was broad and quiet, her eyes that so calmly searched his. He’d put out a hand with its fingers groping. No right had he to touch his brother’s slave, but she dropped the pail and what was the use of arguing as he pulled her to the floor of the barn…as he came to believe that she cared for him?

  Dear Father, what is the suffering of man to that of the Son of man? Can we point to a grief that He has not experienced? Except! He never loved a woman, did he, Father? You spared him that consuming pain.

  —

  John’s month had begun at the home of Brother Moses Hume in Rosehill. After prayers there, he’d been given thin soup and cold bread and his next stop was at the cabin of a family without winter stores where he took no nourishment but offered a quiet sermon on gratitude. We must be thankful for adversity. John included himself in that category since much of his preaching was of a controversial nature and he often felt called upon to defend himself. Once or twice he had met the local Shakers in private combat, but John was not eloquent in debate and some of the settlers had been swept into the muddy pools of an ungodly faith that did not recognize marriage as a Christian sacrament. On this latest trip he had been compelled to travel many miles out of his way over high and steep hills where there were few roads to guide him. Riding into a valley he had erected a tent and preached to a settlement of Baptists while tears dripped from his face. Christ preached among the infidels. He next found himself near Brother McCarthy’s farm, a ride of more than forty miles, and coming home he had preached on both sides of the river. Forth and back, the horse wading or swimming. This was his route and it had taken twelve days to accomplish but he was no mere circuit-riding preacher, he was paterfamilias wherever he went. Praise God. John got up off his knees, which were stiff, dusted them with both hands, and limped to the table to peer down at the lined account book. He was short-sighted. A little dizzy after his prayers. A twelve dissolved when he looked at it, lost in the margins, and he shook his head. If only his eldest son would assume some responsibility for the farm. Patton wore a chip on his shoulder but it was framed in a golden light. How many times had John convinced a neighbor that Patton meant well, never mind the theft of apples and chickens and one thing and another? Oh Emly. I need your arms around my shoulders, your legs around my back.

  So John sat through the milking hour in a cabin that was softened by time and abrasion. He sat at the table his father had made, puncheon, much abused, and he went over the books again and found the errant twelve and folded the letter he’d written to Benjamin into thirds. He tapped the dry wood with his quill. Total value of property twenty thousand, including eighteen workers worth twelve thousand dollars, which could never be redeemed. They needed those workers in order to live. In Britain, the mills were hungry for cotton. Who can eat cotton? Not human beings. He picked up his father’s Bible and thumbed its soft pages. Daniel had once said in anger that the good book could so easily be turned and twisted to any man’s intention that it offered no guide…All things go to the bad, lose their power and slip backwards…those were the words of Virgil, who had comforted the exiled Quaker more than all the Testaments…If he happens to relax his arms for a moment, the current sweeps him away headlong downstream…Daniel had brought five children out of Pennsylvania and now there was only Benjamin, born of wealthy Rebecca, and John, born of a small, sure-footed orphan whose wit was learned in a poorhouse. There was no record of Ruth Boyd’s life, not even a birth certificate. He glanced over at his father’s trunk and nudged it with an outstretched foot. There were three keys in a clay jar on the mantel, two large, one small. John got up and went to the mantel, which was layered with a variety of things, including a recent portrait of his eldest daughter painted by an artist passing through town. John would never have permitted Electa to sit in an unknown room with an unknown man and yet she had made the decision and gone off on her own during the Easter school break, proclaiming that it was a gift to him, so that he could not complain.

  Next to the portrait, a saucer held straightened nails. There was a book of cookery made by his half-sister Mary in her youth. She must have been about twelve at the time and such a trial to her stepmother, Ruth, because the two were actually close in age and Mary had profited nicely from her mother’s polished ways. Then she had fallen in love with the son of Frederick Jones, the town’s founder, and he had run off to the war in Canada without saying goodbye. Ran off with Isaac, the third brother. Never came back. Without slaves, Daniel had needed the help of a willing son, old enough to work and think and take direction and John was too young. So it was all given over to Benjamin. John reached up now and took the cookery book down from the dusty mantel. It had girlish drawings of kettles and spoons and baking pans and described the manufacture of corn pudding and the pecan biscuits they had loved as hungry children. There was a dried snakeskin on the mantel too, another remnant of their childhood, and John thought of his father saving it. Was the old man sentimental? Or was it Ruth? She might have saved anything found or invented by her stepson. There was that jar Benjamin had fashioned one day by the creek and then baked on a fire he’d made by himself. Now John took the small key out of that jar, reaching in without looking because he knew its feel, and he went slowly to the foot of his father’s bed. Daniel had been buried twelve months before and surely a son must emerge from the bones of his father. A son must emerge and gather the dirt in his hands and build his hut and may it become a village, a town, a country. May it become a future if he has the courage to survey the past. My hut, thought John, such as it is, and nothing else left to me by the man whose second and unloved wife was Ruth Boyd. He turned the key in the lock and felt the contents with his right hand while he held up the lid with his left and he picked out a folded piece of paper he had read several times over the past few weeks. Dear Papa: it was dated 1816. We are safly on the east side of the most wondrus of any cascade on this earth. East in this case means North, Papa, and that means we are Safe. (there is a mill on this river that excedes anything you might emagine.) The river takes its rise at Lake Erie which you once showd to me on a colord map. I would tell you of our crossing but I was shoked under canvas so I onlie heard the cataract although was wet throoh and I canot think our Creator would punish us after such trials on the road as we had with the motherless babe. We were dashed by the spray but there are two Falls the water almost Emeralde on the far side and there is a gap I would not enter on any dare. (rememeber Benjamin dared me to cross our creek when it was high?) Then we were met by Friends, Papa. Quakers. They are the last station of the railroad as it is known here. Allways Yours

  John knew that Mary had run away with her sister’s baby on the night Jemima had died in childbed, shunned by her family because she had lived unmarried with Rafe Fox. Mary had stolen the baby to hide her from the eyes of the local residents. But shouldn’t Daniel have told the family that Mary and the baby were safe? Neither of them was ever mentioned again. Not once over the many years since Mary had disappeared had her whereabouts been discussed. It was a local scandal. Rafe Fox went mad wi
th rage and made every effort to find the two slaves who’d run off with Mary. Bett had run off and so had her young son, Bry, who was later brought back. John stared at the letter. In small towns, disappearances are not forgotten. Speculation was endless. Mama Bett had provided medicines to people in Jonesville for many years. She and Mary had worked as a healing team. John was rummaging in the trunk again. I wonder if you, dear Papa, should not take up the employment of sugering? Here the season is one long festival, especially among the indins who mack suger when the hunt is compleat. (most of the work done by the women I should say.) What I lick best are the flowers growing in the Ontario woods. Day lilies the Turk’s Cap We are favorud by clear sky even in coldest winter. John rubbed at his eyes and began to indulge in the anger that was habitual to him when he did not take pleasure in facts. His father had betrayed all of them by keeping these matters secret. And at what cost? How hard it had been to work against a growing sense of family oddity. Perhaps I chose my ministry, he thought, in order to placate our wary community. It was my job to keep them busy with Christian thought and prayer. He slammed down the lid of the trunk, which was full of more letters from a half-sister he could barely remember. He had been fourteen years old when she ran away.

  4

  Sore from his beating, promising himself that he would never eat breakfast again as long as his father presided at table, Martin went off the next morning with his brother and their father’s gun.