A Reckoning

by Linda Spalding

  His brother and sister were getting ready to leave for school. He had to watch Patton pack up his clothes in the old satchel he always took with him when he went away. Patton was pretending to be sad. He was playing more with Martin and even with Cuff sometimes, but Martin knew Patton was glad to be going because their father was lately so hard on him. It’s the way of the world, Patton would say, slapping Martin on the back. Fathers want sons out of the house! You’ll see.

  Even Gina was going to a class for six-year-olds. It was an experiment, since children learned to read and write at home, but Lavina was forward-thinking and she had enlisted a few women of the parish to collaborate with her. The Jonesville school shared space with John’s church in a two-story wooden building. That is, on Sundays, desks were moved aside. On the second floor, the lodge met once a month. Therefore most residents of Jonesville knew the wooden building in one guise or another.

  That fall, John preached hope wherever he went, but he said to himself: Another harvest is upon us and we are not saved. He took his mare into the woods and put his face against her neck. We are not saved. He thought of Emly, her hair in a knot, bent over a vat of cornmeal. Emly had moved her pots outside because food must be cooked even if it is too hot in a small log house. We are not saved. Another worker had slipped away and how were pears to be picked or apples? First there was rain and now there was none. When will you finish? he had asked in passing the vat of cornmeal.

  She had not lifted her eyes.

  —

  The first drift of leaves, the first wind from the north, made John wonder. Would the loggerhead shrikes come back? Did Doctor Alexander Ross have any idea what he had caused to happen in Jonesville? The loan from City Bank of New York had come through and payments were due and John was off riding circuit, gone for ten days, his parish hungry after the waterlogged summer. There was talk of a human exodus, this one west in a wagon train. Some of John’s people looked to him as their leader. There were opportunities. The Kansas–Nebraska Act was forthcoming. Land for pennies. Land for corn and wheat. Land best settled by Southerners who would know what to do with it. Bring their slaves. Make it into something pastoral that would work in the grasslands. What do Northerners know except commerce? Manufacturing has no place on the prairie. Would John gather pilgrims for such a trip? It would be long and none of them knew the way. None of them had traveled so far, forfeiting land and history, forfeiting this extreme point of Virginia once so unspoiled, so clean, so generous in its sun and rain, each of which used to come at the proper time. Once, there had been men to plant corn and cotton, men to pick fruit, and no more Indians to bother with so it was a paradise. Now, with so many workers gone and the land left untended, it was not the same. Would John lead the way? The tawny races of the west were in need of conversion, some said, and they praised John’s oratory and his limitless faith and offered him soup when he slept in their homes and daily John prayed that all, all together by the cross should be lifted. Through their efforts. Through their efforts. He sank into any chair that was offered. He was privately exhausted. He had, at last count, given sixty sermons in the past four months. His church in Jonesville was in disarray, although the arguable sins were pathetic. Should jewelry be allowed? Can we shave on the Sabbath? Can we sing? One parishioner had donated a silver chalice that John returned as too worldly. What does Jesus want with silver? He chastised a woman for attending the Presbyterian Church for its melodeon. Cavils and skirmishes. A Sister was with child and a Baptist had made a mark on her door. Was the baby defiled? John listened and hushed his people and told them time and again: Let us devoutly pray that simplicity and hard work will suffice. Did he believe his own words? What in the foundering world would bring his people, his own family, back from the brink? Without enough workers they were unable to make their harvests, which were anyway rain-mired. Who had a dollar to spare? Benjamin, for example, could not make the first or second payment on the New York loan, which had been taken to pay off the former loan from the Jonesville Bank. He could not make the third payment in September and the notices were coming like bullets in the mail. On the mare’s back, John drooped and all his bones ached. He remembered his brother’s youthful promise: Lend me your faith and I will make us wealthy. Now his throat was raw and his thoughts were all on the future – not on wealth but on the barn in the far distance, on the new child with his own mother’s face. How strange that he should think of that dark child, who’d been given the name Pleasance, when he surely missed his Gina in the usual, aching way. Little girls. He had a soft spot for them.

  Coming home, there was the road ever winding, there was the great brick house in the distance and his smaller place behind a grove of elms. There was all of that and eventually the small chimney he always looked to, Emly’s small chimney, without a hint of smoke. Around and about, the clean sky told of nothing on the hearth, nothing at the ready for the children who would need a meal of corn cakes and buttermilk. The clean sky frightened John more than any part of his long month, any piece of his blemished week.

  I sold her, Benjamin said on John’s return, without being asked. And there was his smile, tolerant, as he said: Her children are scattered to the winds. No offer for Rakel, but Franklin brought a good price.

  John had by then, by the finish of his brother’s words, entered a grief secret and unyielding. He might have said: You made me a vow. I signed that blank piece of paper. He might have added: I signed my life away. Instead, he said: Only with cotton will the bank get paid. His voice was a mere suggestion of voice when he added: You made a terrible mistake. It was the sum total of his spoken rage. He did not display his pain nor did he mention the note of debt he’d co-signed, which lay in a drawer in a distant bank. He might have reached to the shelf behind him and brought forth a copy of that blank piece of paper he had signed so that no slave would be sold. He was sleepless. Emly, where are you? How can I help those I hurt by sheltering the abolitionist? True it was that some of them still clung to him, begging for aid, but he hid in the cabin his father had built and stayed on his knees until they had swelled up enough to take the sharp pain from his head. Scattered to the winds. Those words beat at him as if they were actual things that could be picked up and weighed. Scattered. He could not speak to his insolent brother or admit how much he cared. John and Benjamin lived in separate, hazardous states.

  And they were hit by an early blizzard. It was out of season. It was a rebuke from the Lord. In the cold cabin, John paced. With stores too small to hold through the winter, Lavina begged John to butcher a pig although it was too early in the season and it was a task always supervised by Emly. No one else had her skill with the cauldrons. It was Emly who managed the rending of fat, the making of sausages for both Dickinson households. But the weather! We must get it done, said Lavina. We need to eat; all of us can agree to that.

  John called on Reuben, the most ancient of Benjamin’s servants, and the two men along with Patton and Martin went the whole task of slaughtering, dismembering, and salting the animal, while Lavina and Clotilde awkwardly handled the trying of the fat and the pickling of feet for Lavina’s jelly. Throughout the afternoon there was yelling from the mistress and there were tears from Clotilde, who had come with Lavina from her parents’ inn when she married John. They were close in age. They had grown up together, one always in charge of the other. But in an unfamiliar circumstance, they were not at their best.

  Hog killing had been a favorite time for Emly’s children. Now, in the chill of an October afternoon, John missed their greedy hands and eyes. How they had danced around the cauldrons, waiting for the fat to harden and the rising of the cracklings. Little Lou, who had sat on his shoulders while shouting at the others to stay back from the hot oil. A bossy little cuss you are, John would laugh, and Gina would emerge from the safety of Clotilde’s kitchen to enjoy the sizzling treats along with the others. To John it seemed now that no more joyful time had belonged to him in all his life. Franklin’s sly humor, the way he counted e
very bite given to the others, even as to size. One, two, three, my turn. Those children made the place ring with their antics and John had wantonly taken it all in stride. He had watched the children grow and he had watched their mother and then there had come that morning of the beautiful head against the flank of a beast who gave and gave and when would that giving be finished so that John could put out his hands, his arms, move closer, press himself against his brother’s favorite?

  19

  One night in October, Bry was leaning against a fence, having eaten a turnip, an apple, and a stolen oatcake. The cake had been left on a windowsill that morning while the baker’s family had taken a wagon off someplace, maybe to church, where they could pray for the life they wanted. Bry didn’t feel shame in the stealing of food that was left in such rare company as a tied-up dog and a yard full of heckling chickens. He thought of taking a hen, but the carrying would be awkward and the killing of such a fighting thing was not to his liking and the cake would slake his hunger because it was big. So he was leaning against that log fence enjoying his meal when he heard the low hornlike bellowing of a red deer bull. Bry had heard the males call their own into the hills and down again but he had never seen what afterward befell, which was a herd of two hundred or more…first the soft thunder of hooves and Bry dropped his food and turned and saw them running like water over sand, like a river over a precipice, and he savored that running and envied the deer their good legs and clear minds. With night in their legs and hearts, with feathery darkness descending, they were innocent of guns, of pursuing wolves. They all lifted their heads and moved like one body, males first, calling, taking a stand at a distance in order to watch over the does and the fawns, calling them into a valley where they would be safe, the does taking up the thrum of hooves against soil, some of them eager, each of them having a body of muscle and blood, a mind of intention, protection offered by the few to the many, by males to females, by fathers and mothers to their young. He picked up his cake from the ground and watched the formality of families. He had wondered sometimes how it was that his people were driven so far to the slave ships in Africa. He had wondered what means were enacted to drive them across deserts and rivers and forests.

  20

  Martin went to school with his collar turned up and his boots leaking into the heated schoolroom. He could not seem to listen to anything there. His ears were stinging with words shouted out at home – his father to his brother, his brother to his father, his mother rocking in a chair without rockers, just herself going back and forth with her hands over her face. I give you my last fifty dollars and you waste it on song. Martin knew his father would never say: wine, women, and song. This was a shortcut to protect Lavina’s feelings. Your days under this roof are done. Now go get a piece of land with your warrants. No, Mother, I will not be silenced. We have put up with enough from your big spoiled boy! He is now on his own.

  Sitting on his school bench with his elbows on his desk, Martin thought about his father’s sermons delivered in this room three Sundays of every month and wondered if his father knew God’s purpose as he claimed to do. He wondered if his father knew that he, Martin, was the cause of all the trouble that had come down on them after he’d listened to the birdman tell the workers to run away. It wasn’t Patton’s fault! It was all because I never told anybody about what happened that night. It was my fault the workers left. I could have stopped the whole thing if I’d knocked on the door and told the men to go back to the cellar or else I’d tell Uncle Benjamin. Then he thought: And if I’d never gone off with my brother that day with the gun, Cuff would still have a mother and everything would be the same way it was. He put his face for a minute on the cold surface of his desk. How would he live without Patton?

  21

  It snowed one night in November and the snow kept falling the next day and all night again. It was usual to take ice from the creek and store it on straw in the icehouse but the snow fell so hard no one could get to the creek. Eight of Lavina’s chickens froze in their coop. Within hours, the Dickinsons – both households – were running out of firewood, which seemed an issue of more importance than cutting and storing ice for the summer months so far ahead. The house was cold and Gina developed her usual cough. Weak chest, her father said.

  She needs to get out of bed and play. Electa had said it a thousand times. You treat her like a baby. It’s only a cough. Let her play outside in the fresh air. Electa had been away to school, and she had strong opinions.

  But the parents were joined in this particular mission. Gina must be cosseted. She was timid and sensitive and sickly.

  Then Benjamin caught the fever and began to cough in the way of a man whose lungs are worn thin. Lavina provided Matilda with the syrup Gina used, but it made Benjamin’s head swim and he refused a second dose. His young wife slept in another room and left her husband alone in the cold marriage bed. Marriage bed twice over, and now the floor around it was strewn with Matilda’s stockings and boots and shirts and silk handkerchiefs and Rakel would not tidy Matilda’s things. Rakel said she heard Emly walking in the house, looking for her children. She said sooner or later the big house would come apart without Emly to supervise the kitchen and milk the cows and weave the linen and wash the windows and clothes and iron the sheets and polish the silver and wax the floors and make the cheese. Rakel had always helped Emly some and worked in the fields, but she swore she could not take that good woman’s place. As the snow fell and cold blew through the house, the slaves in the cellar snarled at the second wife, who now had full authority since the master lay abed. They stayed below stairs when Matilda called down to them and it was not for a lady to say what she said when the slaves refused to mind her commands. She called them names; she showed her spite, she slapped. Too old or too young or too tired to run, they had no warm clothes and what does a cotton picker know of snow? This is what they said: What do I know of snow, Miz Matild?

  But the cows must be milked! she yelled. Never mind your bare feet. Get on out there to the barn!

  Lavina had her own household to run and she was no friend to Matilda, nor were Benjamin’s sons, who had fled to other towns and other work. John was as good as useless now where his brother was concerned. He seemed to have lost interest in the three thousand acres that fed all of them. But one afternoon Lavina pushed herself through the snow to help Matilda bring hay to the cows and grain to the horses and mules. She had once been a girl of some beauty with parents who owned an inn. Now she was a preacher’s wife; she kept her hair up in a cap, kept her dress simple, and hardly remembered her lively childhood. She had only Clotilde to remind her of pleasant meals with foreign guests and Clotilde thought of farm life as beneath contempt. Dirt, she called the workers who tilled the ground, and now it was Clotilde to whom Lavina turned for help. John’s mood was too dark to decipher. He had thinned in the face; his eyes were larger and his back slightly bent. He did not offer solace to a worried wife. He sat in his father’s chair in the old cabin, which was warmer than the house but not warm enough. He counted things, moving his fingers in the air. Lavina had seen him do this when she went out to the cabin with his coffee jar wrapped in a heated towel. John seemed despondent, he seemed to grieve. He could not ride circuit due to the weather and surely, thought Lavina, he needed activity. But when he started to deliver a sermon on the first Sunday of Advent he sat down on a chair near to hand after muttering a few words and stared at his concerned congregation without a grain of tolerance for any of them. He did not sympathize with the plight of his dying half-brother or his half-brother’s wife. He did not sympathize with Patton, who’d been sent into the wilderness. He had lost the ability to care.

  One night, lying beside Lavina in bed, he spoke of a toy he had stolen when he was eight or nine. I can’t sleep for thinking of it, he said.

  What was it, Father?

  Oh. Well, I believe it was a ball that belonged to the boy who was raised by my aunt.

  Bry? You mean Benjamin’s Bry? Why on eart
h are you thinking of him?

  Well, he was the first to leave last spring.

  It wasn’t for the loss of a toy, Father. Take your rest.

  On the following Sunday, the second of Advent, John went into his church and found he had nothing to say, not so much as a prayer. Lavina watched him fumble through the Psalms. He looked out at the shivering Methodists whose feet were cold, whose arms were clenched, whose eyes were averted. The church had no heat and neither did he.

  —

  During the Christmas break, Lavina took Electa with her to Benjamin’s house because Benjamin could not leave his bed and his frantic young wife spent her days running from barn to kitchen and back to the barn again. When Electa was sent out to the chicken yard and the storeroom to check on the state of things, Matilda said she felt judged. She stood in the iced-over garden made by Benjamin’s first wife with its unfallen leaves hard frozen and said Benjamin had seven children and she hadn’t created a one of them and all of them were in league against her. Everyone was, or so Matilda claimed, and there were envelopes to her husband from City Bank of New York that she was afraid to open.

  Lavina left her alone and went off to make tea. The big, separate kitchen was a masterpiece of planning on Benjamin’s part, made to please Elizabeth, but it was too far from the house during a winter like this. Now Lavina and Matilda and Electa sat by a frosted window in the small indoor kitchen and Electa offered to take some tea up to her uncle Benjamin, but Matilda said: No, thank you, leave him be. The snow was a wrap around them and Matilda had taken refuge under a shawl while Lavina sat on a hard-backed chair and looked through the window at Martin gamboling in the snow with Cuff. The thought came to her that there was nothing so pretty as a bear in snow, and she smiled as she watched Cuff roll over and over and then stand and shake and start the whole thing again, rolling and standing and shaking. Cuff usually slept during the daylight hours since winter had started but she would come out to play at the slightest temptation and Lavina watched Martin throwing snowballs at his bear and Cuff trying to bat them back with her paws and she told Electa to excuse herself and go join them. It will do you good, she said kindly, and I will enjoy the sight.