A Reckoning

by Linda Spalding

  In this way he came to the city of Toronto and it was nothing like Louisville or St. Louis to the runaway slave. Here, he would not be apprehended; all that was finished; here, he belonged to himself although he asked about a Negro woman who might be working to heal the sick with the herbs she blended. There were buildings of stone and the noise of creaking drays and of constant hammering and digging and horses whinnying and human languages he did not recognize. He stayed for a night in a shelter where people asked if he was Protestant or Catholic. It seemed to be a question of some importance but he shrugged and accepted a bowl of oatmeal and stirred it with a finger as he sat on the cot he’d been given for the next six hours. This shelter was in the thick of a midtown place known as The Ward, a place of vagrants and immigrants and those too misfortuned to make a good life, and the next day he found work carrying stacks of wood and bags of coal and earned the first money he had freely made and he kept it under his shirt in a pouch and there had never been a more pleasant weight to carry.

  80

  Lavina proceeded north, traveling by inches in the cart. Late in the late afternoon she saw the sun in a hollow like oil in a pan and knew there was water down there where red grass was rippling. She stopped the mule, wrapped the lines around the cartwheel, took her skirt in her hands, and stepped down. She was so close to her destination that, had she kept going, she might have reached it in an hour but, far off, they could hear the longing of coyotes and she decided to stop for the night in the smells and light of an unlikely place. Kansas! Grass and more grass into eternity is all it was.

  They had left behind the trees and stepped off into this! Had they gone blind? Where was the beauty in a world of horizon always meeting up with sky? Nothing, nothing in between! A hawk wheeled overhead. Electa was sent to look for buffalo droppings. Gina pulled grass for kindling. Lavina cleaned the rabbit, keeping the skin as an heirloom since all of her personal things had been drowned. She thought of the crate her husband had tried to protect with his body. She cut the rabbit into pieces and washed it in the water they had collected at the morning ford. She built a cooking rod with two forked sticks and a third laid across.

  Electa took the pony and mule to be watered. The three remaining cows had followed them and they were resting and chewing after a meal of bluestem grass. Electa came back with water and buffalo dung and threw herself down on the ground. The water will not be fit to drink, John would have said, but he was not there and for a while they watched the sun like a letter slide into the ground.

  Lavina put the rabbit in the new iron pot John had purchased in Independence. I have an iron pot, she said for no reason in a singsong voice, speaking foolishly to the two children left to her and thinking of the little one named Caroline who was killed by her cart. When the meat browned, she added cream skimmed off the milk that morning, and mother and daughters lay around the fire as if everything they might have to say had been said in the months that had gone before. All this long time they had been surrounded by other families – children, animals, parents, babies being born and babies dying. The entire movable world was all one family to which the Dickinson women belonged, but now they were plunged down on the softened ground in the darkness of Kansas Territory, with its stars that held up the sky. Appoint the cities of refuge….A city with churches and tolling bells.

  Gina was asleep on Electa’s lap and Electa was spitting small bones at the fire that burned on grass growing out of rock laid down by prehistoric seas and below the rock more rock and fossilized fish. Lavina lay on her back, arms spread, and took inhalations of sky. In the morning I shall have a bath in that pond even if it is lively with snakes. She patted her scarred leg where the skin resembled the striated ground. She had a bowl of rabbit stew kept aside for John when he was ready to be seen. What had he taken in the way of victuals that morning? She studied the stars, knowing she would spend the night where she lay. Ad astra per aspera. It was warm enough and the planets bristled. Then a low sound reached her ears, something more human than feral, and she saw a rider, then another splashing through her future bath. The apparitions hovered for a time in the evening mist of the disrupted pond as if they carried the news of something forthcoming.

  81

  The next day, Patton cut down a cottonwood tree – there were ten of them by the creek they claimed. Why the tree? Because the house was to be built of sod and must have a frame. It was close to the Nebraska border where they stopped after traveling a few paltry miles from the meeting place, the bathing pond, the scene of frantic and joyous reunion, and John sat on the ground smiling while Patton and Martin chose a site for the house. John could see the horizon, the overwhelming sky, the general color and shape of everything past and present. He watched Patton take his brother into the prairie, where they made two furrows of even width and depth with the spade he had bought during the second visit to Independence. He got himself down to the place where his boys were cutting through earth that had never been cut by hand or tool, grass that had never been cut except by teeth. He could see that Patton was up to his old tricks, covering protectiveness with horseplay. Patton used the spade to cut sod pieces three feet long between the furrows while Martin piled the soft bricks in the bed of the topless cart. John waited with his sons until dark, then helped them draw a line for the wall plumb to the North Star. Against the hard sky, they worked as shadows in firelight, placing bricks side by side. Where the door was to be, they left a gap. Cracks were filled with dirt and two more layers of bricks were laid, breaking the joints. Eventually, they wiped their faces on their sleeves and lay down on the waist-high grass.

  It was from the cottonwood tree that they fashioned posts for the doorframe and window the following day. These were placed in the wall as the sod piled up around them. Martin went back and forth between the wagon and the walls, carrying the soft bricks that his brother and father laid.

  When the walls were six feet high, Martin climbed up on the cart to lay enough bricks for gables at either end while Patton worked on a ridgepole and rafters. John felt the wind against his brow. He felt the essence of time, which was merely a rotation of duties. They had set down in a place that had no name and now John watched Gina build a miniature house out of Kansas clay. The sun was indiscriminate overhead, but the boys added a sheeting of brush to the rafters and over that they put a layer of sod and prairie grass. They cut the earth with a scythe and laid it on in batches as if they were creating a lawn on the roof or a grave.

  In due course, Lavina was picked up by her jubilant sons and carried into the tiny sod house. They had built her a bed. They would make her a stove out of clay. They would cover the door with a blanket, which could be raised to let in air or lowered to keep out rain. Lavina sent her daughters out with pots for water from the creek they had named Wolf. Wolf! cried Gina. It was her favorite story, or the one they most often told her. Never cry wolf. Never declare an untruth or it will come back to bite you. After months of travel, the family had shelter. Thick-walled and dark, the sod house gave respite from sun and wind and later from cold. Everyone clustered inside it. They stood and breathed in the dark, moist air. John prayed. Martin stood off to the side. Patton said: How bout I make us a table? The roof crackled and a sifting of earth fell over them.

  It was nine by twelve feet, their new home, and they would learn to sleep inside on summer nights when rain soaked through the roof and ran down faces and necks. When it came from the north, they moved to the south side of the dwelling. When it came from the south, another move. When the roof was soaked through, it dripped for three days and nights. Lavina managed to cook with one of the girls holding a pan over her head. At the first sound of thunder, she put all the dishes on the floor, on the stove, on the bed in order to catch the water.

  Meantime, there was only to walk from one place to another since the cart had no road to hold to. They walked to fetch water, to hunt, to plow, and to plant although sometimes they went on horseback. They walked or rode through the tall grass, through bru
sh, and over creeks. Together, Patton and Martin acquired four hundred and fifty acres with their warrants. This was the whole of the world. There were no trails, no bridges, no stores, no churches, no neighbors, no place to mail a letter or buy coffee or sugar, not within fifty miles. No barber, no mechanic. There was no legal framework, no law, no doctor to call when they were sick. The prairie sod was so heavy that their plow cracked on its first attempt at breaking ground but sod was used to build a corral, a henhouse, a corncrib.

  Sunflowers appeared on the roof.

  And Patton went down to the creek with the cart to gather up rocks. The barn he planned would be three feet thick and made of native limestone with holes through which to shoot Indians or abolitionists or bushwhackers.

  John sat in the shade while the barn went up stone over stone and his thoughts went back all the way to Bry and the fort they had built as children. They had played all one summer in the woods, trapping and snaring and fishing, having battles. Redcoats and Yanks. Happy. They seemed to be friends until John went off to school and Bry was taken away to Rafe’s fields. Friendship was impossible then. He passed a hand over his eyes because his sons were losing their edges. Too much light. The fort was designed by Bry, the point being not to defend but to create. And they had used stones gathered from the creek. It is right firm, Bry would say. He had the speech of two educated mothers, one white and one black, although he had no doubt lost that speech over the years and John thought then about the magic of language and the fort built piece by piece, a little at a time.

  Of course stone was more work than sod and harder on the hands. But it is not so different building a stone fort or a stone barn, John decided. Square off the corners, lay the pieces down true. Break the joints and turn every third row crosswise. How did Bry know about plumb lines and clay mixed with sand? Those walls had held for so long that Bry had gone off to belong to Rafe Fox and John had been left to rule over their kingdom. He took the long piece of grass he’d been chewing out of his mouth. It had gone from sweet to bitter, from dry to moist, from tough to soft. He watched the boys toting stones. Patton had engineered a sleigh that he loaded with small-sized pieces and towed across the future barnyard. He stood in the cart and threw the stones down and then rolled them along in a kind of scrimmage, sometimes using his two feet, sometimes bending down and pushing with his arms. In this way, he managed the biggest stones and felt justified in demanding the biggest supper. They judged the hours by the position of the sun. And later they sat with the stars and ate close to the fire, as if nostalgic for the limbo they had come through. Lavina was stirring the food. Metal plate. Tin spoon. Biscuits and beans. Round and round. This sky. The shelter of stars.

  82

  The city of York was large and confusing and it began to seem unlikely that Bry would find Bett without a surname attached to her. He had been asking about her for three frustrating weeks. Has she no surname? He was asked that time and again. Nor could he claim such a thing for himself. Son of Bett, he might have said in the old-world way. Bry Bettson.

  One day, he was directed to the door of a woman known to everyone as helpful in such matters. And she heals the sick.

  It brought a stir to his heart but The Ward was full of runaway slaves and free blacks and immigrants who were homeless from Ireland or some part of Europe and he would not assume anything. There was a horse-drawn taxi driven by a black man, and there was food growing on the edges of city streets, and wandering pigs, and with its upright stone and mortar banks and office buildings, it was apparently British in its intent although here, too, there was a river cutting through ravines with somewhere to go, an inland sea to be endlessly fed. It was that unsalted sea he had kept on his right side as he paddled through forest and farmland. He had slept by its lapping and fished in it with a string. He had squinted and looked for the other side and never found it, which meant he was safe. Now he knocked on the door of a woman whose patients came to her daily with complaints and illness and killing fatigue. They came to her during epidemics of cholera. They came with measles and scrofula and ague, with lice, with rat bites. She had a place with two cots and a room for herself, and her days were full of the old and the sick and the destitute. She was, in fact, on her way out the door when she heard a light tap and found Bry on her doorstep gentle of bearing, not very tall, somewhat old and rather bent. How did she know him? Why did she throw herself into arms so strong from the paddling of a dugout canoe that he could lift her off her feet and hold on to her? Would know you anyplace, she cried. Dear Lord, I would know you as my son anyplace. Tears and tight holding body to body until they were too weak to stand and found chairs by the table that served as her desk and her place to eat.

  How did you never let me know where you were?

  I thought you were lost. We thought you never made it to…the…

  Bry waved her next words away and both of them cried for uncounted minutes. It was crying that encompassed all the people they’d known who would never arrive, and those who had been wounded in the process of unknotting the bonds of heart and flesh. This mother and son had not seen each other for too many years. Forty-one! She went over his face and neck and shoulders and arms with her eyes and then with her warm mother hands that he recognized from the press she’d exerted that had so often sent him into comforting sleep, and now she fastened him with such a piercing examination of muscle and bone that he was glued to the chair and she said, not knowing the lasting damage done, Well, you look all right.

  He said: Mama. You know where my child is?

  And so it was that my mother stood in the doorway of a small sod house, earned and yet never hers in the way of an ancient relationship to the land, while Bry’s mother stood in a doorway far from her starting place, picking up the broken pieces of the oldest relationship in the world. Don’t do that to her, Bett said, taking his big, hardened hand in hers. Leave her be, my son. Let her live this life she can understand. She knows me as her mother’s servant.

  —

  A month later, when he came to her house, he stood outside for some time wanting to touch the skin of Eva Nell’s pinewood door, the door of a home where she’d lived first with Mary Jones and now alone because it was a proper place to weave or write or teach, all the likely occupations a white woman might pursue at that time. He watched through a window as she sat at her loom and he imagined the conversation they might have. Come in and sit down, for heaven’s sake, she might say. Let me give you a glass of beer. Or water. What do you like? In truth, she would have no idea. Mother Mary had come home with the frame of that loom years ago, balancing the wooden object in her arms. Bett had helped Eva Nell warp the web and then taught her to weave. It was what she did now. She could weave a shroud or a Christening gown. Sunshine for white, logwood for black, or a pattern of both, interwoven.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I thank my beloved Michael for his encouragement and advice during the years I worked on this story, for reading it gently and believing in it fiercely, and for his affection, which sustains me. I am grateful to my daughter Esta Spalding for her careful study of the manuscript followed by her brilliant recommendations about structure, content and expectation. And thank you, Esta, for the title! I thank daughter Kristin Sanders for interacting with my characters so entirely that they found more courageous paths through the narrative than I had expected, especially Martin. Chris Dewdney helped track the Thames River in Ontario, and I thank him. Stan Etter charted the complex route of a dugout canoe from St. Louis to Chatham, Ontario, however unlikely that may seem, and I am eternally in his debt. Rachel Hall found the truth of the current in a section of the Ohio River. Oh rivers! I thank you for refusing to give in to our demands. Lead us and bewilder us. Move and meander and be covered sometimes with corn and bury your secrets. I thank the Arabia Museum, which displays some of those secrets as testament to the willfulness and pride of the pioneers. To Michael Redhill and to Barbara Gowdy, who read the manuscript, I am grateful for your meticulous care and co
ncern. Each of you is irreplaceable as advisor and friend. Martha Kanya-Forstner of McClelland & Stewart read, reread, edited and consulted throughout. What a gift to this book she has been. Ann Close at Pantheon has kept close watch and her sensitive and considered point of view has been invaluable. Ellen Levine has represented it and championed it. My gratitude to Martha, Ann and Ellen should be shouted. And I want to mention, here, the learning I received from Ellen Seligman when we worked together on The Purchase and on ideas that led to A Reckoning. I still hear her dear voice questioning, suggesting. I thank Janet Yorston for medical notes regarding third degree burns. My very sincere and heartfelt thanks to St. Andrews University in Scotland for hosting me as resident writer in 2016 and to Don Patterson and John Burnside for making that possible. Special thanks to Tara Quinn for the red deer; to Leah Springate for the beautiful design and map; blessings on Karen Solie for keeping the house warm and on Jasper and Jack for consistency of affection and mettle. And on Shelby Morgan for the last word.