Balm

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

  Clearly, Madge had moved into a desperate house. A maid and butler long departed. The cook, Olga, a terse woman of few words, left to do it all. Cook the widow’s meals, iron anything that wrinkled, stoke fires, clear ashes, wipe lamps, trim wicks, beat rugs. Olga hired out the laundry and the coachman cared for the horses, tamed the run of yard, ran chores, but the house was large enough to cause the German to skip the smaller, less noticeable tasks. The widow did not entertain, and Olga took full advantage of this lack of scrutiny. When Madge arrived, the house was neat and orderly enough, but the cut crystal on the candelabras was coated in dust and balls of grime gathered in corners of rooms.

  As the days went by, Madge started to think more and more about a woman she had never called Mama: smoking and chewing as she recounted stories of Madge’s father, Frederick Kingsley, freed by his dead master’s will only to find the document contested by an unscrupulous brother. The three-room house, the tree out back where the women strung up dead animals to bleed out, the last pair of shoes the youngest sister made for her, stored beneath the bed and forgotten during her hasty packing. Although she tried not to think of them, she could not help herself. The sisters’ voices crowded her head. Do it this-a-way, do it that-a-way. Girl, you act like you ain’t never handled no rag.

  Still wrapped in the memories of the sisters, Madge did not flinch when the widow called her into the parlor and claimed that a dead man spoke to her.

  4

  LIVING AS FREE COLOREDS IN A PLACE LIKE TENNESSEE put the sisters in a between-space. Their free papers liberated them, but an indelible shadow remained. The women lived at the mercy of the folks who patronized them, forced to tend their paying customers as carefully as they did the garden out back, while less than a mile away, slaves toiled in the sun. It was the things the women were capable of—the rubbing out of sore backs, careful excision of a bullet, sewing closed of a wound, set of a broken bone, break of a fever, relief of an ache, puncture of a gumboil—that kept them safe. Their teas and poultices, tonics and ointments had value, and the sisters were treated like shamans around town despite their refusal to tread more determinedly into God’s realm and declare themselves two-headed doctors. But when somebody was sick and didn’t seem to be getting better, it was the sisters who came. Even the ones who supposedly did not believe in their knowledge sent for them. They doctored on the high and low, men and women, colored and white, slave and free. There were a number of people in the area who owed their lives to the sisters, and this proved to be no small debt.

  The three—Polly Ann, Sarah Lou, and Berta Mae, for their mother had given each of her baby girls two names as a way to elevate them—were the second generation to walk about freely. Raised by a woman who had been jilted by a man she’d made the mistake of trusting, they grew up understanding the futility of forgiveness. Men, their mother taught them, would not allow them to do all the work they needed to do in the world, would do to them as the sisters’ father had tried to do to her: rob them of the one thing that gave them standing feet. The story went that their father, a slave allowed to sleep with his free wife at night, never forgave the wife for not being able to save a frostbitten toe and ordered the healer to stop concocting.

  “Woman, if you can’t save me, you can’t save nobody.”

  The wife refused, and the next she heard, he was back sleeping in his master’s barn, leaving her to raise the three alone. So she taught the girls they had a choice between becoming a wife or a healer, and that the bond among them was stronger than anything. When one misbehaved, she beat all three with a hickory switch. When one fell ill, she forced the other two to stay up late tending the sick one. Three rows of plaits, three pairs of shoes, three dresses of homespun cloth. Only their looks differed: Polly Ann more like her father, short, round, with a belly that stuck out like a melon from a young age and never left; Berta Mae and Sarah Lou built up like the mother—tall, long-limbed, broad-shouldered, except Berta Mae got her father’s dark-like-soil coloring, and Sarah Lou the red-tinged brown of her mother. When the mother died suddenly, the three sisters cut the wood for the coffin themselves and buried her beneath a dogwood tree, white blossoms shedding over the fresh hump of earth. They were all late into their teen years when they stood over the grave holding hands, the prospect of survival without their mother looking up their noses. Up until that time, the mother had led, directing the mixing, receiving the messages, carving out the morning’s path through the woods while the girls acted as her capable assistants.

  “We got to let ’em know she dead,” said the oldest, Berta Mae.

  What Berta meant was that now they would have to let folks know their mother was dead of something serious enough the daughters could not cure it, and that, despite that failing, they would be stepping into her healing shoes.

  The first thing they did was take stock of all they had—what had already been picked and what was still shooting out of the ground. What could be eaten now and what could be eaten later, how much meat was salted, how much milk they could reliably draw from the goat, how many eggs the three hens marching around the yard might yield. None of the sisters could read, but they had been taught when they were young how to figure numbers in their heads. So they set about accounting with the desperation of orphans, and when they were done, they agreed that their mother’s foresight had been considerable.

  They could survive a year without healing a lick.

  For months they floated lazily for the first time in their young lives, eating berries and steeping teas that were delightful just because they were delightful. Rather than sell the goat’s milk as their mother had done, they drank it themselves, made cheese and sat on the porch eating it with fresh bread. Although they had calculated a year’s store, they disregarded their numbers, and after six months, the youngest—Baby Sister—peered into an empty cabinet. In the meantime, the middle girl—Sarah Lou—chased the goat who, still thinking of her as a playmate, hid in a thicket of blueberry bushes. Nearby, the oldest, Berta Mae, cast two eyes upon a bug-ridden patch of cabbage.

  The community had left them alone, partly because they did not fully believe the girls could do what their mother had done. But on the very day the sisters realized, one by one, that it was time to step into their mother’s shoes, someone knocked at the door. A woman named Thea who lived on a farm just two miles west reported that the white woman who owned her had taken ill. Thea’s wet hair brought news of a storm that had not yet reached the sisters’ house.

  “She ain’t getting no better. She look near ’bout to die.”

  “Where her husband at?” asked Baby Sister.

  “He gone off to see about his folks down near Somerville. I reckon when he get back he liable to say I done kilt her.”

  “You got something to pay us?” Berta Mae asked.

  “He ain’t leave nothing!”

  “Lord strike you.”

  “You gone help or not?”

  Berta studied the woman. “She don’t even know you here, do she.”

  “Her husband kill me if she die. Besides, she a good woman. You help her get well, I pluck my eye out and give it to you.”

  “That old eye ain’t no good and you know it.”

  Grayness descended upon the trees. The trunks cut through the mist, standing tall and straight like the dark legs of women. The sisters went back inside the house and closed the door behind them. Outside, rain began to hammer the ground, a pool of water filling the crater in the front yard. After gathering what they needed, they prepared as if they would not return for days. Baby Sister tucked scraps of men’s pants around the windowsills to keep water from seeping inside. Sarah Lou put a bucket in the middle of the floor.

  They walked in a line behind Thea, wide hats shielding their faces. At the farmhouse, they found the white woman lying in a pool of sour. All three sisters recognized her, remembering the time they had visited this very house with their mother some years before. The husband had been bitten by a mule, and they had come to tend a
finger that dangled like a rotten tooth.

  “I get the fresh bedclothes,” Thea said, disappearing into another room.

  Baby Sister helped the woman into a sitting position so they could pull her gown over her head. Sarah dipped a rag in a bowl of water on the table and cleaned her up. The woman did not resist, her eyes lidded.

  When they had changed her gown and remade the bed, Sarah said, “I got some garlic in my pouch.”

  “Ain’t enough.”

  “What about some sage.”

  “Ain’t got none.”

  “Who was supposed to have brung it.”

  “Here, ma’am. Eat this bread.”

  “You the one been eating up all the store.”

  “Just heat the water for the tea and stop wagging your tongue.”

  “What we gone put in the tea, dogface.”

  “Shut up and get that water boiling before I slap the both of you.”

  The two older sisters settled upon a canker root tea to kill whatever was upsetting the woman’s stomach while Baby Sister made her sit up and eat the bread. Despite their fighting, the sisters worked together, one on either side of the sick woman, the third holding the cup to her mouth.

  “I can’t hold nothing down,” the woman said.

  “Just eat one more bite of bread, ma’am. And drink,” said Berta.

  She drank. Visibly coloring, she avoided the sisters’ eyes, saying only to Thea, “That’s well enough. Pay ’em.”

  The sisters met Thea on the front porch. “Give her that tea every day. Put this leaf in it.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  The younger sisters looked at Berta Mae. This part had always been left to their mother, even when the girls were the ones to give the instructions on when and how to take the medicine. It was their first pronouncement.

  “What you think? Throw that meat out you give her. Ain’t fit for a dog.”

  The sisters looked uneasily at Berta, frightened her mouth would kill their business before it started.

  “I could have made tea,” said Thea.

  “You already done cooked for her and look what happened. Now you heard what the woman said.” Berta stuck a hand out.

  Thea reached into a barrel sitting on the front porch and counted out six potatoes, four ears of corn. Later, Berta would say, “I knowed she was lying ’bout not having nothing to pay.”

  When the woman got better, she spread the word that the girls were their mother’s daughters after all. The people sent for them, calling them into their sick rooms and paying for medicines with food, cloth, shoes. The daughters shed the idleness of the past months, and, before long, they had gained more confidence, Berta leading the way. Without their mother, the sisters stuck to their school of three, talking their way through the woods in order to remember all that the mother had taught them. They refused to marry, sticking by one another’s side, rebuffing advances from men whose attentions they viewed as dangerous. They finished their second decade and began their third, marching faithfully toward the destiny carved out for them. It did not prove difficult, for their beauty was not such that men vowed to have them, and more than one frightened person whispered that the sisters danced in the woods at night.

  Then Frederick Kingsley arrived, and Sarah Lou lost her mind for a brief time.

  As Sarah’s belly inched out the waist of her dress, the other two sisters shunned her. But by the time Madge was born and Kingsley had moved on, the sisters, satisfied with his departure, forgave the middle sister. Instead they blamed the baby, and as soon as she could walk and talk, Madge knew what it meant to be an unwanted child. She had been born into a community of women whose survival depended upon their loyalty to one another, and she upset the balance. Just as their neighbors working the nearby plantations had been born into slavery, Madge inherited a set of memories she had not chosen.

  WHILE MADGE WAS STILL TRYING to claim some kind of love from the sisters, the armies fought in Tennessee near the Kentucky border. By April 1864, the war had reached within a hundred miles of the sisters. Folks nearby claimed there were thousands of men fighting on the banks of the Tennessee River. The sisters could hardly believe it, but they still bolted their door at night. Stories of slaughtered men left lying on the battlefield and tent hospitals stretching as far as the eye could see hinted to the women that a time would come when their healing services would be needed more than ever.

  After the battle at Fort Pillow, groups of slaves with armfuls of belongings began to make their way through the woods. Folks were on the move, and Madge wanted to move, too. If she stayed in the same house of her mother and her mother’s mother, continuing to serve the same folks they had, then the war meant nothing. She wanted to know what this newfound freedom had in store for a colored woman born with papers. She had seen and held the documents none of them could read, buried beneath the floor, declarations containing their names, complexions, heights, the dark pepper-shaped scar over Berta Mae’s left eyebrow, the missing fingertip on Baby Sister’s left hand. In return for removing a red hill off a white man’s foot, he had read the words to them, precious pieces of paper that were more than paper, containing words worth more than scripture. In the meantime, Madge could not resist the restlessness that the word freedom created. She had shouted out loud when the first battle cry sounded, but the three sisters had merely shut the windows. Good news, they said, was usually followed by bad. Dark-eyed and uncertain, desperate for a life better than the last, the newly freed people boarded northbound boats and wagons, walking in groups or alone, trickling into contraband camps. Madge decided to join a group walking north to a city of ships and trains. She had no idea how many weeks of walking it would take to reach that land, but she was determined to go.

  As she prepared to leave that hot summer morning, she carried a head full of noise: This woman is my mama. Surely she feel something more than nem other women. She had figured the two would not speak to her that morning as she put her free papers into a satchel. She had expected their silence.

  Her mother stood in the yard washing clothes in a barrel, her hands moving up and down in the water. On the line, two dresses swayed, headless bodies.

  “I be leaving soon,” Madge called out.

  Her mother did not swipe at the thicket of hair netting her face.

  “I come to say my good-byes.”

  Hot water sloshed up Sarah’s forearms, reddening them in the early light.

  “Ain’t got much time.”

  Sarah rose from the stool, wrung out a pair of drawers over the ground. She did not appear to notice the dirty water splattering onto the bottom of her dress. She turned away from Madge, hung the drawers on the line, carefully spreading them so the wind could pass through.

  Madge had expected the two sisters to stick their lips out at her, but Sarah Lou was her mother, and with all the optimism of a young woman her age, the daughter had expected something more than the back Sarah had shown her.

  5

  IN LATE SUMMER 1865, SADIE’S FATHER WROTE TO say that her mother was ailing and to come at once. It would be the first time Sadie had returned home since her marriage, and she longed to see the familiar sights of her town: Market Street, George Street, the courthouse, Centre Square. No canal ran through York, carrying with it the stench of sewage and dull sight of barges. She was full of expectations, so when the conductor walked through the car yelling York! she stared through the window, signaling frantically for him.

  “What happened to the station?”

  “They burned it,” he answered. “Didn’t you know? But the people have built another one. A testament to their spirit, I’d say.”

  The old depot had been made of wood. The new one was brick. To steady herself, she recalled the feel of her mother’s fingers in her hair, the tilt of bacon from pan to plate, the plain dress sewn each year. When she saw her, Sadie would admit the letters had been lies. She would tell her all about James.

  But for the second time in her young
life, Sadie arrived to the news of death. In front of her house, Sadie’s trunk still on the seat of the hired carriage, a neighbor woman reported her mother had died of fever. Sadie ran inside, anticipating her father’s face, but the rooms were empty. She sat in a chair, removed her hat, and placed it on her lap.

  The fact that the house had been spruced failed to cheer her. Freshly laundered linens covered the bed in her old room. Fennel sprayed from a jar on the kitchen table. She waited for the old man, but when he arrived, they said little to each other. The bookbinder’s hands were more curled than she remembered, fingers reaching toward palms. That night, he cooked supper for the two of them, dropped the spoon twice. She sat at the table watching and did not stoop to pick it up. He plated the food, and she tugged at the meat on her bone. Across from her, he studiously chewed. The kitchen was hot, close. He wiped his forehead. She remembered the small “mh” her mother would make as she ate, the soft grunts of satisfaction. Her father had cooked on occasion, her mother waiting patiently at the table, relieved of duty. Sadie put down her fork.

  “You told me she was ailing. She’s been dead for months.”