A Reckoning

by Linda Spalding

  Delay?

  Just announced. Only a day or two. Is it a burn? I am glad to examine it. Keep in mind that I am trained.

  Lavina leaned back, resting on her elbows, panting a little.

  The pain is very hard to bear?

  It is constant now.

  It was fire?

  Water. Lavina smiled at her joke, then shut her eyes and winced as he lifted the hem of her skirt, a finger trailing up the inside of her leg as she inhaled, shivered, tugged her skirt down, her petticoat stained. But then she pulled the hem up to her waist and closed her eyes. What nonsense to feel modesty when she was at death’s open door and the man was a medic. Of some kind. Almost a doctor, which she hadn’t found in town. Lavina was a woman who had never exposed herself to any eyes, not even to her mother’s when the first baby came, the first living one, and the old granny midwife cut the baby’s cord too close, which was too much to think about now when her bloomers were loose and her stockings did not quite cover her knees and the burn was leaking nasty juices and by the look on Brother Borden’s face he was noticing the putrid smell she had tried to cover with liniments. There were splashes of mud on his jacket but he was tucked in and otherwise tidy and the eyeglasses and trimmed beard gave him a look of fastidiousness and nothing had helped so far, none of the unguents or tonics, and his hands moved so gently on her skin as he advised her to take a brandy, which she refused, but the syrup was close to hand and she reached for it.

  Have you linseed oil? Some carbolic?

  Yes.

  A cocaine solution would be good for your pain.

  No.

  Have another sip of the laudanum. A good swallow.

  Lavina licked the rim of the bottle and felt faint with the searing pain just under his hand as he pressed.

  Is your medical box nearby?

  Must I be bled?

  On the contrary, Sister. The circulation must be revived.

  Lavina pointed and Brother Borden leaned across the width of the wagon and pulled the medical box to his side, opening bottles either corked or capped that contained liquids that he certainly recognized. Now please relax. The bladder may react, which will help in the healing, take my word for it. Just hold on to my arm and I beg you to think of nothing but your betterment, your ease, your…

  Lavina gripped his arm. She flinched as he pressed on her lower belly. Oh dear…

  Have no shame. Our urine is very clean.

  She thought of her children romping beyond the wagon, romping with bears and cows and ponies as she wet her neighbor’s hands and felt a gash of stinging pain on the burn.

  Good. Good. Oh, yes, dear Sister. You must lie back. Now. Slowly. Carefully. Let me help you…there…The voice came from some place Lavina had never visited, a dark, warm comforting cave. She thought of John putting his hand on her in the place where Brother Borden was touching her and when she woke there was Electa at her side and a clean dressing on her wound. He says to stay like this for another day, Mama. Why didn’t you say you were so sick? Electa was in tears.

  45

  All bags should be put on board before midnight. Wagons tied down. Animals aboard. Creatures to eat and sleep and relieve themselves in small stalls under the main deck and the bear to travel in a metal cage fitted out for a stallion on a previous trip. Passengers should board by eight o’clock having taken breakfast.

  You must reconsider, Brother Borden said.

  The syrup has such effect. Lavina dips her head. Are you hoping to purchase my ticket? That would be unkind. She smiles faintly. She looks at him sleepily as his fingers touch her swollen thigh and what a time to think of the hole she’d dug in the rain what a thing to be doing under the apple tree, depositing a little lump of flesh with folded arms and a mushroom face, unfinished life, a failure and she could not like John’s touch afterward and he soon lost all interest. Oh! My goodness! What?

  There, dear Sister. There. There. Close your eyes and listen to my words. I want to tell you that you need my further care and…I hope your family will stay in our wagon train so that I may help you mend. It will be so much easier for Brother Dickinson to find you on the trail rather than on a surging and dangerous river and an expense for him as well and I could mention the Glencoe right here in this harbor that exploded in a hundred thousand pieces. So many dead. Oh, Sister, please just lie back. Brother Borden was pouring lotion into his cupped hand and stroking tenderly, ankle to waist. Circulation, Sister. I must insist. You are in no condition, his voice was silk, to go off on your own with the burden of three growing, rambunctious children. And your awful pain…

  Four, she said firmly, trying to focus because it was best to do something when the syrup was working its tricks. I purchased two cabins, Brother Borden, so you might use one of them and look after me until I am saved. A smile. She giggled. I mean, I am saved, but I am not healed, am I? She drifted, reached for his very large hand that was always moving on her skin where she had no thought of connection to herself. She said slowly: Make arrangements for your animals and wife. Wife and animals.

  His fingers brushed her lifted knee once more and followed the poisonous stripe.

  46

  Two miles away, at number 88 3rd Street, Bry was in the barbershop of Washington Spradling, a former slave who had amassed enough wealth in real estate to purchase several less fortunate human beings. Since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, runaways were more often captured for gain than they had been in the past. Even papers of manumission were meaningless to the men who collected bounty by taking freed slaves back down South and selling them illegally. By purchase, Spradling had freed thirteen men and three women without breaking any law, but Bry now owed him two years of labor in return for eventual manumission because, when he was dragged off by the two men who had bought him from the horse breeder, he had been taken to the auction block in Louisville, where Washington Spradling purchased him.

  Penniless whites were sent to debtors’ jail but blacks without papers or with papers torn up or disallowed were hauled to the nearest market and put on display. Bry had collapsed when he was shoved into a group of bare-chested men, all of them angry, hurling insults at their captors. A contagion of terror.

  But now I am legal, Bry told himself as he straightened his apron and looked in a barbershop mirror that had notes of deliverance and thanks stuck in its frame. Legal but not free. Doc speding you mad me saif. Mister I name my child after you. In the mirror, Bry’s face was thin after his hard year of travel. He had walked up the edge of Virginia. Then he had crossed the mountainous region of eastern Kentucky on foot, hoping that he was in godly Ohio. He had gone to beg for a bite of food because he was too exhausted to care and believing he should be safe enough in Ohio. He had done his begging in a state of such hunger and weariness that he could not count his fingers when he held them up and now he touched the mirror and stroked his new beard, short and curly against his face. His pants were double-belted. He was thin as a sidewise board. It had been only three days in that fine horse barn and then he was snapped up like a done-for horse and taken off to the auction block between Market and Main in Louisville, where Washington Spradling often came to intervene. It was the best possible outcome according to the man who had purchased him. You were a likely target, Spradling shrugged. No papers. You are one lucky old nigger to get bought by me and you’ll be a trained barber, too, so I call it a fair exchange.

  In Louisville, Bry came upon one woeful thing or another, such as posters about the American Party, with Washington Spradling telling him to stay clear of that bunch who were out to get Negroes and immigrants, legal or not. One day Doughty and Rilo, his fellow barbers, were given the afternoon off with him and they went to hear those American Party men in spite of the warnings, listening to church bells all over town, even a Lutheran one on Preston Street and two Catholic and one Negro, but the American Party hated the Irishman or German or Negro. They gave their speeches with a cannon firing off one bang for each of the thirty-one states and the three
black barbers could see the mayor on a platform saying it was Germans who started the un-American idea of abolition, people who didn’t belong in the great United States. At the word abolition, Bry nudged Rilo and the three of them backed away from the crowd, but there were men who grabbed at their arms and when Bry saw an opening he took off while Rilo got knocked down and Doughty went back to pick him up off the dirty street. Doughty had been in the barbershop for two years and would soon have his paper, but Bry was afraid and he ran back to the barbershop and hid, feeling something like shame as he thought about Doughty’s brave act. No slave could take the risk of standing up for another on the farm, but here in the city it was what one man did for another. We, too, are human beings, Bry said to himself that day and he resolved to start looking after those in need as he stood in front of the mirror contemplating his new beard and then he suddenly jumped seeing in the chair behind him someone he could not believe was there. There was no need for that someone to lean back for a shave since he had no hair on his face, but his locks had grown unseemly long and his parents had probably sent him in search of a cure for that and he had surely wandered into this town and come upon Spradling’s barbershop, where a fiddler played in the doorway although why he was here in Kentucky was anybody’s guess.

  Say there, he said to Martin.

  How am…but…you! Martin stopped himself because Mister Spradling was watching.

  Bry said: How’d you get here?

  My uncle Benjamin died, Martin said hurriedly, wondering how much to say in front of a witness. Then he added crossly: Then most everybody left us. It went all to pieces after you after you.

  Bry had no idea that his escape had precipitated the downfall of two families, the end of an era in Jonesville, and while he stood in the inner doorway of Mister Spradling’s barbershop and rubbed his curly beard, Martin looked at the boots Bry was wearing, given by a horse breeder who had turned him over to profiteers, and Mister Spradling took up a pair of scissors and put a hand on Martin’s forehead. You want to do this? he said to Bry.

  Bry said: Everybody left to where?

  You coulda had a paper, Martin rolled his eyes at the irony of it. My pa freed the ones who stayed for us to the end.

  The end. Bry thought of the squirrel he had strangled after feeding it for two days. He felt a flaming rage against the boy in the barber chair. Want to take over? the barber asked again, seeing the look on Bry’s face, and Bry took the scissors in his trembling hand.

  Martin plucked at the towel tucked in at his neck. Like old times, he said nervously, although he had never been this close to Bry, who began to hum something roughly similar to whatever the fiddler was playing outside. It was perhaps a jig, although which of them could know that? Bry tucked his left hand under the stringy hair of the Virginia boy and took a first snip. He had done barbering for a month at least, but he had no technique.

  Don’t make me look like a monkey.

  Your ears sticking out’s none of my doing.

  Are you going to put a bowl on my head as my pa does it?

  Don move. It was the first order Bry had ever given. Are you goin to tell on me?

  Martin put a finger on his lips. Who’d I tell? My uncle’s dead and Pa’s left behind.

  Bry stopped the scissors and stared in the customers’ mirror. He said: This man gave me a contrack. He nodded at Mister Spradling, who was stacking newspapers on a stool by the window. Two years…I owe him, Martin. It was something to use that Christian name.

  47

  The house John found at the end of a long, shaded lane was almost familiar, its four columns reminders of what he had left behind, its roof a statement against sky, its chimneys unlikely in this Tennessee valley. He put a hand to his throat, testing his ability to speak. Ah, Ah. He must offer no more money than he had sewn into his jacket but somehow convince Mister Lucas, a man he had never met, to release a woman who was no doubt serving his household with her usual stern dignity. A woman worth ten times anything that could be counted. Your brother is…going to sell…God in His Heaven would not see Emly spend another night on this plantation, fine as it was in aspect. Lower than low were the people who inhabited Tennessee plantations. John had three hundred dollars kept aside, squirreled away, hidden from his wife in all their adversity. He had Elizabeth’s sapphire earrings because he had seen them in a bowl on the dresser when he went in to Matilda’s room to take her bags down to the buggy that was waiting to take her to a stagecoach. He had scooped them up and now he decided he had not really meant to hang himself; it was only a moment of desperation because he had sent his family away. A man does not line his pockets for the afterlife.

  So he was admitted as one gentleman admits another. The heavy walnut door was thrown wide and he was shown in, dusty, unpleasant of smell, oily of face, and wary. Taken to a book-lined room where an unneeded fireplace offered glowing coals, he was shown to the softest chair. John could breathe now as he sat back against a cushion. Then his host left the room to order whiskey for the uninvited, unexpected, overtired visitor, never mind the morning hour. When he returned, John admired the draperies and spoke of his journey with pleasant sentences. He complimented the room, the books on the shelves. Fine-looking bindings, he exclaimed, crossing his dusty legs and then uncrossing them and scratching the back of his damp neck. He sneezed and excused himself while his host smiled and sat waiting in another soft chair. I’ve been seeing to my family’s departure, John said irrelevantly, brushing at his jacket.

  The Tennessee host put his hand behind one ear. Whaat waas that you sayed?

  How different is the length of the vowel down here, John thought. He had been in many rooms on his Methodist circuit. He had taken coffee, tea, water, lemonade, and even an occasional cider. He had offered pleasant stories on topics guaranteed to go down well with young or old, male or female, but here, in this fortress of gentility, he was about to perform the one and only act that could bring him ease. A mourning dove called from the garden beyond the bookshelves and windows and walls. John straightened his back. He cleared his throat and tried his voice. Ah ah…I believe you may have someone serving your wife – your household – who by rights belongs to mine. Voice loud enough to be heard by the man with a hand behind his ear.

  I have no such thing.

  No servant? John was trying to imagine such a thing. He looked at the painted wall above the shelves. Was it brown? Or shit yellow? There was the calling dove, the wall color varying as a slab of sun played across it. He noticed a flowering tree outside the tall window. Then the person he had come to find entered the room with a loaded tray. She held it with both hands while John traveled the whole of her with his eyes, taking in the swollen belly and the beloved face. She set the tray on a table within her master’s reach as he uttered not a word of thanks. Who thanks a slave?

  Emly stared at John as he came out of his chair, took hold of her arm and pressed his fingers against its bone under the wonder of warm, human, oh so desired flesh. Mister Dickinson, she said, leave me be.

  48

  The New Statesman. Letters of gold. She was a back-wheeler newly tucked into the Louisville wharf with a drawing room on the upper deck and a wide promenade from which the northern shore looked almost close. Lavina had reserved two cabins, one for the Bordens and one for the Dickinson females. Martin would sleep in the wagon that was parked with so many others on the cargo deck.

  The family boarded the main gangplank while Martin used a lower one to bring the wagon and bear across, then the cows and the pony. After positioning the wagon, he penned the livestock and tucked the mules and pony into narrow stalls. Cuff would travel in an iron cage.

  Noisy and smoky, boilers raging, engines clanging, and whistle blasting, the New Statesman plastered the town with loud announcements of its importance, then backed slowly out of its berth and turned upriver, passing a cotton packet and an excursion boat. The lower cargo deck, strewn with crates and wagons and farm animals, was as chaotic as a country fair. This w
as the place for the steerage passengers, with food already being cooked on an open grill and, without side rails, the rough water sometimes lashing at anyone who stood too close to the edge. Up above, on the promenade, the first-class passengers looked back at the southern shore, where dogs and pigs and chickens nosed through weeds and trash. A dead cat floated beside them in the water alongside a pile of rotting fruit. They heard the hiss and whistle of a train, as if all of Louisville was on the move from there to anywhere else and it was a new and thrilling sound.

  Lavina was about to travel farther from home than she had ever wanted to go and she was doing it as a virtual widow, although she reminded herself of her married status whenever Brother Borden applied his gentle hands to her body producing sensations unlike any she had felt before. Relax, dear Sister, Brother Borden whispered, running a warm hand up and down the whole length of her back. Lavina curled her toes and stretched. Was this entirely medical? Her healing occurred in no certain place or time as the great paddleboat churned upriver and her heart churned and fluttered. She expected John to catch up with them while, at the same time, expecting that he wouldn’t. She wanted what she could not have, but there was no way to define what that was exactly. Meanwhile, there was nothing to cook, nothing to mend, nothing to spin or plant or clean. No wagon to drive, no livestock to manage. Her children were happily romping and the leg was still horribly scabbed. I can hardly move, she moaned, lying back and lifting her dress up to her waist.

  On the lower deck, Martin watched two black deckhands coil lines. Were they slaves? Or free? They looked about his age and he had an urge to speak to them about what he had done: his secret. He felt something he had never felt, a shaky triumphant sense of power, all his. Above the second deck there was a third and above that, high over the water, the pilothouse. But down at the level of water, Martin was guarding a wagon that held all the Dickinsons’ goods, along with a fifty-six-year-old runaway slave.