A Reckoning

by Linda Spalding

  He wiped at the air and jumped off the feed box, almost believing he had erased the stain of his own compliant past. As he handed each man and woman a letter with the slave name at the top and his own at the bottom, he felt relief for the first time in months. Who was to gainsay such a document other than the bank, which now owned these men in all legal terms and would certainly interfere within a matter of days, might chase them down, sell or imprison them? But there were mules gathered in the pasture, specially purchased for this occasion out of his dwindling pocket cash. Three dollars each! John stood with his chin on his chest, taking deep breaths of barn air, glad in his heart to be stealing this precious property from the New York bank, resisting in this small forceful way an acknowledgment of his own sin.

  At the last minute he gave a letter to Clotilde, who stood apart, the only person owned by his own household. He was sorry to send her into the wilderness but she had talent and would surely make her way. Don’t look back, he wanted to say, thinking of his servant turned to salt before his eyes. But Clotilde’s hands were clenched and she did not reach out for the paper. He had never impressed her is what she showed in the thrust of her chin and pressed-down lips and one piece of paper from his hands did not change that. Not forward or backward or sideways was she going to move for him. She knew her chances, and they were slim to zero of not being stopped, harassed, stolen, raped. The law required any manumitted slave to leave the Commonwealth of Virginia forthwith. It required each letter bearer to hurry to an unimagined life. There wasn’t one among them who could read or write, man or woman. In fact, John thought for the first time: we might have given them that at least. And he raised his voice again and went back to the box to get some height. He said: Listen here now. No two mules are alike and every one is as smart as you are. But each of you will have a mule as my gift. I will not let thee go…, he thought, remembering his first sight of Clotilde at the wedding feast he and Lavina had been given at Redbanks Inn except…thee bless me. Clotilde had been an intrusion then, an embarrassment, but now she would leave with the others, forthwith. Take it! he said, thrusting the paper in her face. Lavina had not been consulted but she must sooner or later understand that nothing of their former life could be saved. All of that was finished! He watched the familiar bodies file out of the barn in the two-by-two pattern they used in the fields and he raised his hand and briefly waved. Through the door and out beyond, he could see a wagon lurching westward on the road as if his future had been fast-frozen on the lens of his eye.

  30

  Lavina sat in her brown linsey dress on the seat of the wagon listening to Electa complain about the oily smell of the muslin covering and the way her father was being ignored. Having dressed herself for a funeral, Lavina did not care much for her daughter’s opinions. Wait until you feel this wagon shake your bones, she said coldly, believing at that moment that women were cursed by belonging to men who were cursed by ambition and hope in false things. Better to take up some practical livelihood. Take up hat making or weaving. She sat on the wagon’s only seat with her shoulders high and listened to her husband haranguing their son. Yes, he had the nerve to come down to the road where they were gathering and issue forth a series of decrees. Yes, he had the nerve to express himself on a subject that no longer concerned him. And would she ever lay eyes on him again in this lifetime? Was this not the bitter end of her previously sacred married life? Leave the cursed bear, John was shouting, and everyone now looked away so as not to see his furious farewell. Drop the cursed rope or I’ll hang you with it from the nearest tree! It was the one forbidden threat in the Dickinson family. It was a thing never said because in another time, in a previous, earlier, more savage time, a slave had lost his life in just such a terrible way. But John made the threat without apology. His eyes were glass as he hurried along the line of wagons, eighteen in all, front to back. Chiseled by impotence, he was raving: The bear be damned! He grabbed Martin’s arm and twisted it behind Martin’s boy-skinny back. But with the other arm, Martin managed to tie Cuff to a metal ring inserted in the rear of the wagon, near the words Dickinson Partner Ship. You are not in command here, Father, Martin said, bearing the pain in his shoulder without giving any sign of a flinch. Let me go! With his face screwed up he pulled hard and John raised a hand as if to stun his boy with a blow, but there were witnesses enough and Martin thought of the new mule so recently yoked and converted to his father’s purposes. He thought of the watching neighbors who had fallen down before his father more often than salvation required. He thought of Patton taking the strap and himself taking it too, time and again through his childhood without a chance to explain action or innocence or intention, and the slaves taking it differently, more roundly, more sharply, and he wrenched away from his father, angry most of all at this indignity in front of people who were going to be his companions for the coming weeks, people he must know not as a boy but as a man, and he did not want them to see him being meek. If you will not bless us, he said to his father in a voice to be heard, you might bless the mules who will take your family away to some unknown place to live without a stick of shelter. It was, for Martin, an uncommonly insolent thing to say, during which he closed his eyes as his father’s hand came straight at his face. Then Martin was on the ground, sprawled, with his nose bleeding and his jaw bruised and the pain sending shocks to his ears while grown men turned away. Most of them had listened to John call down heavenly angels one day and the wrath of God the next. They were some of them from Jonesville and most from other places. They had heard John’s plan of travel and dedicated themselves to his authority. John knew the facts, the truth, the solution to any problem. John had answers. They had forgiven his former trespasses in the matter of housing an abolitionist, since it was a Christ-like error, but when word went out that John was not willing to pull up his stakes, although he had no stakes left to pull, he was regarded with a new suspicion. What did he know that he wasn’t telling? Was he sending them on some ungodly mission he himself had declined for good reason? All the talk of missionary work to come, of Indians and kidnapped white children. His recent sermons had conjured up a number of demons to be overcome and then the paradise that he was now avoiding. Maybe the preacher was a fabricator, a medicine man who sold snake oil in cloudy bottles. The whole family was somewhat off-kilter. Maybe the preacher was informed of some evil awaiting and it was left to the ordinary men, the less educated men busy with harnesses and children, to face the wild west without the word of God to protect them. Their women were hugging neighbors, shedding tears, looking at familiar landmarks and at beloved relations for the last time, and all of it had been John’s idea. How else could it have come about? They were sure that none of them would have considered such a rash endeavor without the mandate of a preacher who was the Lord’s very ear and mouthpiece. Now he was a defector. Someone suggested in a whisper that he should be shot in the back! More like he shot us, another said. Children were screaming, laughing, crying, holding puppies or kittens or being held by weeping grandmothers. The animals bellowed nervously, voicing a universal complaint. Where? Why? How? Martin picked himself up from the ground and wiped his bloody nose on the sleeve of his jacket. He touched it carefully and wondered if it was broken. The pain was so blinding that he truly hated the father who had flattened him in front of people he now had to join. He had friends who were watching from the sidelines. Girls too. His eyes were hard when he stared at the blood smeared over his father’s hand. He thought: This is the last time. He will never hit me again.

  Around them all the swirl of activity. Boots, ropes, hooves, and wheels. John grabbed little Gina as if she were his shield.

  Father, hand me up the baby, said Lavina sternly, and all of them watched as John kissed his favorite child and lifted her up to the height of his hat. Gina clung to his neck and buried her face in a place at the side that belonged to her, but Lavina leaned over and pried her loose and took her up kicking and screaming and the wagon received the extra weight and creaked on its w
heels. Come, baby, Judy is stamping her four little hooves. She’s ready. Isn’t that so, Father?

  John agreed that Gina’s pony was ready to be off, for though tied to the far side of the wagon away from the bear, she could be heard snorting and whinnying playfully. Martin had the four cows more or less gathered.

  Quite an entourage, said a neighbor who was standing by, and John said: Indeed, in that almost inaudible voice he adopted when he had nothing to say. May God bring you to His promised land, he muttered, and the Dickinsons remembered to pray silently for one minute in the old Quaker way although the words John heard ringing in his head were his son’s: You are not in command here father. He heard it. He heard it. Certainly there would be no such thing as command once they were beyond shouting distance. Letters would be of no more avail than they had been with Patton, who never responded and may not even have received his directives since he could only guess where that son might be at any given time. He saw Sister Galway running toward a wagon with a basket of steaming sweet rolls. The Lord giveth. And everything from this minute on was unstoppable. All that had happened was irreversible. All of what had been acquired was thoroughly gone. The barn, the pigsty, the smokehouse, the old lean-to, the great showpiece of brick. And his own built house. Something he should have protected since its sacrifice hadn’t saved Emly or anyone else. And so wrapped was he in anger and pain and disconnection from his past that he left the road without turning to look after his family. He strode through the milk gap wondering how many cows had come through it over the past sixty years. John’s mother had supported the family with the butter she sold. Butter from her own little herd. John had watched Benjamin take all her love and use it up. He had watched Benjamin inherit her herd and put Emly in charge of it. He sniffed at a blooming lilac. How much butter had been churned and how many slices of bread had that butter graced? Then Emly’s fine cheeses, created to whet and to satisfy any appetite. Cows and cotton and corn and fruit trees. All to the ax, to the knife. All crumbling in his ragged mind as he walked to the cabin built by his father, its logs still holding although the chimney was showing signs of wear and the old steps sagged. John was not yet born when a slave boy named Simus had fitted those steps into place only days before he was strung up in a locust tree. And that tree had become a place where the slaves went to pray or to sing. Sacred, it was to them, and John turned to look back at the wagons now, angry for no reason he could name. The train had started to move, every separate part bumping and banging against the next. The cries of men and horses. The grumbling of cows and mules and the frightened squeals of pigs. Chickens. Dogs. John’s chest was a cage. What was inside? Back on the road the talkative neighbor had taken a look at his ashen face and said wasn’t it a blessing the children were headed west although, he said, confounded Pierce. A president getting innocent people killed in the name of what’s nobody’s business, our way of life.

  John had tried to agree. Pierce had sat down at his desk to sign into law the Kansas–Nebraska Act and now everyone wanted a piece of good land. But Missouri was a hotbed of confederates – there were enough sparks out there to ignite a war between North and South and Patton must, by now, be there….John turned up the path. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his sweat-beaded face. Politics had nothing to do with it. Everything was survival and nothing else. With Conestogas, there are decisions about what to carry, what to leave. Should a stove be packed? If so, how much clothing and bedding must be left behind? What tools were essential? What could be better picked up in St. Louis or Independence? Some of the wives in this train had baked bread and dried it, believing that it wouldn’t mold. A kettle of hot milk and a crust for those families would, on many nights, have to suffice. But that wouldn’t be the case with Lavina, whose smoked bacon was double wrapped, put in the storage boxes he’d designed, and then covered with bran. Sacks of beans and rice and salt and coffee were wedged around the family medicine box, which held dried herbs and bottles of laudanum and alcohol and calomel. Hadn’t John’s father come from Pennsylvania in a wagon? John’s offspring were born to this. (For that instant of leave-taking he felt almost proud.) He took a cigar out of his jacket and stuffed it in his mouth, although he could not allow himself to smoke. Americans will never be confined, thought John. Those wagons moving toward the Cumberland Gap must look to God like a white serpent on a dark green carpet divinely made for such a trip. Or would God liken that serpent to temptation? Was such a trip taken against nature? A breaking plow, axes, saws, spades, hoes, and carpenter tools. To wrestle, to tame, to inhabit, He was counting off on his fingers the equipment he had packed. A cook stove with its pipe running up through the muslin top. A bed frame. Two chairs. And, thought John, there are the warrants issued by the government for buying property. Patton has them, surely he does. Or had he gambled them away? Lost them in an argument? How could he have trusted his wild son to keep their last remaining treasures intact? Well, in truth they belong to the boys, he admitted to himself. One had been easy enough for Martin to obtain by trading it for a sow he had raised. And Patton earned his one way or another. Didn’t my own father create the acreage around me out of three meager warrants from the war with Britain? They will make out, he told himself. The best thing for everyone is this outcome. He saw that a button lying on the fresh grass had fallen from his cape and thought: Let it lie.

  31

  John, then, sitting in his father’s chair with its bit of carving at the top and such a boy he was back when the chair was made, Lavina newly wed to him and both of them looking forward. Daniel had even carved Lavina’s initials on the chair. It was a wedding gift, but it never got moved out of the cabin and he could not now remember whether she had rejected it or Daniel had decided against giving it to her. Was she too worldly in his eyes? Too proud? She had arrived with a slave, but it was only Clotilde, who was part of her family. And he next thought of his father’s stash of letters, the hidden daughter in Canada. It was impossible to assess the motives of anyone else, most especially if they were dead and gone, but he got up and moved around, drumming his fingers against hard surfaces, thinking about the trunk at the foot of his father’s bed and the wagon full of his family, each with a secret and separate heart. How could he even know his own wife, who had set off so staunchly with the whip in her hand? But it hardly mattered. He would not see that wife or those children again. He thought back on the confidence of his youth when every six weeks he had ridden to Baltimore to buy and sell for the mill their father had constructed. It had become the Mill House. The Comfort House. It had become a popular trading post and nightspot, much to their father’s surprise. It was a place to buy supplies for overland travel and then it had a table or two and playing cards and brandy made from their orchard fruit and Benjamin had created himself there night by night, winning at cards, making political friends, doing business one way or another while young John was sent off to bring supplies from the Tidewater east. Tobacco, bolts of cotton, sugar, coffee. On those trips he stayed at an inn called Redbanks, where he met and courted the daughter of the house. How exhilarating to feel the wall of wind in his face as he rushed the horse over a road he could measure out by its bumps and windings on the blackest night. Each bend and bump meant a shorter time to his destination, which was his future, all shine. Each bend and bump meant a minute closer to the girl whose face and voice meant chaos and harmony in his young body, and on the way back from Baltimore, it was fury and joy until he had left the inn behind at the halfway point. Then he let the horse slow down and he would not read those ruts or care and he knew that what he was experiencing was a thing to be seized.

  Serving the Lord, he had made himself a farmer. Corn, he had thought back then, along with tobacco, would be the ruination of the land, for those plants sucked the life out of the soil by requiring too much deep plowing. Cotton had been impossible until a highland version was found but now, with the gin, it could be grown in southwestern Virginia by the ton. So then, cotton. But slaves were essent
ial to cotton and corn was essential to slaves. They used it in bread and hominy and pone and mush. They roasted the ears. Corn, then, must be planted. John was a practical farmer with a hungry affection for the women around him. For Lavina, his rhubarb grew with lush, almost tropical foliage. For her, John had grown fat muskmelons and a nutmeg melon and a citron melon from which she made an iced dessert. For Elizabeth, his brother’s wife, he had grown a patch of berries for her famous pies. Later, much later, for Emly, he planted Pattypan squash. It was a staple the Dickinsons enjoyed along with their slaves. Peas on a fence. Potatoes. Radishes. Cabbages. His food garden was so like his mother’s that people remarked on it.

  John went deliberately now to the trunk at the foot of his parents’ bed and gave it a disrespectful kick. He opened it without a key, for it was never locked anymore, and he took out the letter he had been reading most recently, several times in fact. Dated 1835 it read: Dear Papa, It seems I am mortal. I have put Eva Nell into the employ of the school she attended.

  Pray for her Papa, M

  John put the letter back in the trunk. It would lie with the others that had, over the past year, fed him certain truths. The shrike are plentiful here in September but success requires dogs, which are a luxury. Oh if only you could see with my unencumbered eyes. John frowned. Then he lit a fire that would consume all the secrets. He added the farm account book. Go to Blazes. He thought of adding the lump of treasure stashed in the lining of his jacket, but he was too tired, too confused by the smoke filling the cabin to unstitch the seam. He was too weary even to feed himself out of that iron skillet on the edge of the old stone basin. His throat ached as if he’d been crying, and when he looked through the window glass at the barn where his father had kept his hay and his wagon and his heart, he saw that it was his father’s barn and also Benjamin’s and that it had never been his. He had gone out to meet Emly there where horse and cows and mules and pony and bear had until that morning resided in harmony and he had never belonged to it as the rest of them had. He had never belonged to the land that his father acquired, but he looked at the field he might have planted this year, a field smudged in uncut grass, a square of earth all his until the New York bank took it over, and he brushed the heel of his hand across his face and then looked at the hard, accusing eyes staring out of his daughter’s portrait and went to it meekly and stroked the painted chin of his child and then flung her into the fireplace. He heard the wagons take up their burdens and roll very slowly and awkwardly down the road past the campground his father and the elders of Jonesville had built, a clearing for God’s work, and he remembered how he had been carried to that site on his father’s broad shoulders, how he had felt the scratch of Quaker homespun. He could feel the bounce of his father’s walk as they set off for that place crammed with carriages and wagons and he might even then have suspected that it would all turn to gall in his mouth. His father, who hated slavery. And look what they had come to now. O Glory! he had heard a thousand people shout over the years, but the barn light never dimmed. It was the screen upon which his life was ruined. Who was Job to complain? Haven’t I mounted my horse and ridden my circuit year after year after year? But I was only a man, John thought, as he tapped a thumbnail against the one plate left to him. One glass too, and the iron skillet. His life had become a series of walls without a hole to shoot through. I will go then, Lavina had said, she who had climbed up in the wagon and taken the reins.