Balm

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

  “Where do you sleep, Miss Tennessee?”

  She could barely breathe. The thought of taking him upstairs in Sadie’s house terrified her. But she could not stop her feet as they found their way to the back stairs, Hemp following closely. He pushed at her back with his hand as if to keep her from changing her mind. When they reached her room, he closed the door behind them.

  The room was cold, and she shivered as he slid her dress from her shoulders.

  She turned. “Hemp.”

  He pushed her onto the bed, his thighbone separating her legs. She made a curring sound as he lunged into her. A frightened horse’s yelp carried through the closed window. She listened for the widow’s bell, certain it would ring at any moment. He covered her mouth with his. She felt a wetness on his cheek and tasted the salt.

  “Hemp,” she said again when she could open her mouth.

  He did not say her name, did not say one word before he left. She lay there, inhaling the scent of his spilling and wondering if he had been thinking of Annie again.

  Without him, a cavern opened inside her. She needed something from him that he could not give. Maybe the only love she could try to make some kind of claim to was back in Tennessee. Maybe it was worth a try to return there, even if it meant leaving behind the business she had begun to carefully build out of Sadie’s kitchen.

  Tennessee. Tennessee. She formed her lips to make the sounds.

  Chicago was an ugly, dirty city. She hated it, and she hated him, too.

  “I WANT TO SEE him.”

  Michael sat across from Sadie in the drawing room. Just the day before, she’d had to kick Hemp out of her parlor. Or perhaps James had kicked him out. The sessions with the spirit had begun to blur the lines of her reality.

  “Sadie, for God’s sake. This is no time to abandon me. I need to tell my brother something.” He leaned forward and spoke into her ear. “James! James! Can he hear me? Does he have to be summoned?”

  “Michael, stop it. Please.” She said it as though he were a child.

  “You don’t understand. I need to tell him what happened. I need to show him something.”

  “It’s over. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

  “You don’t want to do what anymore?”

  “Talk with your brother. I’m tired.”

  “Look.” He pulled a folded piece of paper from his inner pocket. She took it from him.

  “I don’t deserve my brother’s compassion. I bought my way out of the war. I must confess.”

  She barely looked down at his commutation papers. “You weren’t the only one.”

  “I am a coward.”

  “Look at how many we lost.” She stood and walked to the fireplace, pulling at the new hairs sprouting from her knuckles.

  “That man, my driver, was freed by the war. And he still can’t find his family. I should have done it. Fighting was the right thing, Sadie.”

  “The right thing for whom?”

  “My brother died in my place. My younger brother. I should have bought his exemption, not my own.”

  She threw the papers into the fire.

  “What did you just do?”

  “You don’t need those.”

  He lunged for the poker and tried to retrieve the papers. A few pieces fluttered out. He picked up a piece and dropped it, sucking his fingers. Its brown edges crumbled. He grabbed her as if to hurt her and kissed her instead. She stiffened and pushed him away. He reached for her again, and she slapped him. A spot of blood appeared on his lip.

  “What’s wrong with us?” he cried in a hollow voice.

  “We’ve lost sight of right and wrong, that’s what.”

  “What has happened to me?”

  “Michael, you must listen. Your brother isn’t here.”

  Clouds passed above the house and the room shadowed. His arms hung loosely at his side like flippers. She patted her forehead with a handkerchief. He began to sob and she tried not to listen, turning from him. Too much grief. The whole country in flames.

  His ankle throbbed. He thought briefly again of the driver and his missing family. “I’ve been thinking about your proposition.”

  The room began to close in on Sadie, as if it were a tomb. She had lied. The spirit was right there, listening to everything. And he was making it difficult for her to breathe.

  “Don’t answer,” she said. “Not yet.”

  19

  MADGE HAD WORKED HARD TO RID THE house of its smell: boiled cabbage, brined meat, and the lingering scent of cigar in the front parlor. Instead, she filled the house with the fragrance of herbs heaped in porcelain bowls. Madge’s idea to scent the rooms. Madge’s idea to draw back the curtains. Olga did not appear to enjoy the changes at first, but Sadie approved, inexplicably drawn to this proud woman who had quickly picked up how to run a house.

  It was also Madge’s idea to invite the mediums to dinner.

  Madge wiped the railing leading to the second floor and dusted the crevices of the carved sofa in the parlor, while Olga roasted a mallard in the kitchen, preparing for a table of four.

  When the mediums finally arrived, they said: “I was not expecting such an invitation” and “My business is doing poorly because of her.”

  “Please wait, ma’am,” said Madge.

  Upstairs, in her room, Sadie seethed. A visitor had asked if the colored woman was still selling roots out of her kitchen. Then she’d seen with her very own eyes one of her visitors exiting the front door and making her way around to the kitchen at the back of the house. A few hours later, Sadie peeked into the food storage closet and found shelves of containers, jars, sacks. From floor to ceiling, the colored woman had hoarded enough to fill a store. The air inside the closet breathed. Sadie glanced down at her feet, afraid something might scurry over them. She rarely ventured into the kitchen, and she was taken aback. The woman was running some kind of herb business from her kitchen.

  She took the back stairs to Madge’s room. The room smelled odd, too. She stuck a hand beneath the mattress, her fingers closing around a cloth sack the size of an apple. She pulled it out and held it to her nose: the bitter of garlic. What kinds of beliefs did the woman attach to it? Madge readily accepted Sadie’s contact with spirits, and Sadie was grateful for that. But the fact that each woman secreted her own lore did not excuse this behavior.

  As Sadie sat at her dressing table pinning her hair, she could not decide what to do. When Madge entered the room, Sadie was still thinking about it.

  “They waiting for you downstairs, Mrs. Walker. Them women,” Madge said in a rhythm that still carried more than a touch of Tennessee in it.

  Sadie turned to look at her. “What are you selling out of my kitchen?”

  The colored woman’s face did not register fear at the blunt question, and her posture dared Sadie to make something of the discovery. Sadie had tried to tone down her anger, keep the hint of a threat out of her tone. Still, she was thinking that this breach was serious enough to ruin the arrangement and send Madge back out into the streets.

  “Whatever they need.”

  Sadie studied Madge’s face. Long and narrow, eyes set close together, cheekbones angled wide and then down in a dramatic slant, brown eyes that sparkled hazel in the light. A crowning of thick hair bundled into two braids. Madge’s body was a foreign country, as strange to Sadie as Samuel’s corpse had been. Sadie wanted to know what and how she was healing, but she was not even sure she should keep the woman around as she tried to comprehend exactly what kind of person she had brought into her home. Madge was some kind of witch doctor, a charlatan. Sadie had read about these cunning slaves who lived on plantations, weaving spells, telling fortunes, calling upon evil spirits to do their bidding. They claimed the power to heal, but they more readily used their knowledge to harm. They carried charms, amulets, and other fetishes, summoning spirits and ghosts to aid them. They threatened their foes, and people feared them. Some were known to be religious, devout even, but these claims to Christianity
did not negate their practice of a dark art.

  “What exactly did you think I was doing when I made them teas for you? Healed that thing on your shoulder? Made that touch of fluid in your chest go away?”

  The maid’s voice was unapologetic and loud. What if she had been putting something in her tea at night?

  “Those women have done nothing wrong. Why would you cheat them?”

  “I ain’t no cheat.”

  “You were sticking your hand in fire when I met you.”

  Madge rubbed her arm, keeping the elbow straight. “That was different.”

  Sadie felt a spark of recognition. She was fairly certain the colored woman could not read. Yet there was undeniable depth in those furrowed brows and bright eyes. This ironic coupling of the two women was not lost on Sadie. Her job was to speak to the dead, to assure the grieving of a smooth transition between this side and the next, the connection of the spiritual and physical. Madge’s work also dealt in death, the delay of it. If the transition were as smooth as Sadie claimed, the door as wide open as James promised, the fear of death was eliminated, was it not? That was the problem. Madge’s work was not based in hope. Engaging Madge was to trade an illuminated belief in the other side with a vain search for earthly immortality.

  Sadie considered the pomp of death’s revelry, the yearning for a hallowed version of life. The cortege, bier, hearse, coffin, pall, marching horses. The tolling bells and solemn firing of cannons. All of it proved little more than attempts to make sense of the end. Sadie had sat beside Samuel’s body for hours, a one-woman wake long after the visitors were gone. There had been no doubt about his lifelessness.

  “When Samuel died, people came to the house to see him. Olga put out whiskey, and they drank while speaking of business, the city, the war. They mentioned everything but him. Then the undertakers came to take him to the cemetery. I didn’t go. I waved good-bye to my dead husband from the front door. That’s the kind of wife he bought.”

  The natural light fell. Neither woman moved to light a lamp.

  “My mother died before I could say to her what I needed to say.”

  “Mine’s still living but she couldn’t hear me if I shouted.”

  Sadie looked away, thinking of the lives cut short by war. Madge believed this life was worth saving, and the mourners who visited Sadie’s parlor proved the woman right.

  “Everyone has to go eventually.”

  “Passing in my natural sleep will suit me just fine,” Madge said.

  “I wonder, after I am gone, who will knock at that door hoping to hear my voice. If anyone will knock at all.”

  “You surely won’t know who do and who don’t.”

  “I ought to fire you,” Sadie said, hardening again.

  “I can save you the trouble.”

  “You are not to sell anything out of my house, do you understand?”

  Sadie pushed a curl behind her ear. She would go down and talk to the mediums, hear their stories, pretend she did not know how much they hated her. She would show them the portrait of her husband, discuss the wonders of James Heil, share her table. Perhaps they might even share a secret or two of their own. She had never felt more alone.

  “Tell the ladies I will be right down.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Walker,” Madge said.

  “THIS CITY AIN’T NO PLACE for me.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I’m going home. Back to Tennessee.”

  “Tennessee?” Sadie patted the sweat from her brow. It had been over a week since her discovery, and she’d decided to keep Madge on. But now the woman was telling her that she had made a decision to leave.

  “Leaving for good?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Madge poured coffee into a porcelain cup. She stood back and watched as the widow sipped. A weighted silence hung between the two women.

  “Why?”

  Madge started toward the door but decided to turn around. Her mouth opened, and before she could change her mind, she was telling Sadie about the dream. This dream story was the kind of tale that would have perplexed most people, but the widow, diviner of spirits, understood a dreamer’s intuition. Madge told how the house had motioned, the door flapping open and closed like a mouth, the windows blinking like eyes. Madge didn’t know why she had dreamed about the house, but she knew that ever since she’d taken advantage of Hemp’s weakened state of mind, she’d been missing her mother. Perhaps that was why the house beckoned her home. It was time to return and make amends, get right with the Lord. She could not shake what the widow had said about her own mother’s death.

  In the two years she’d been in Chicago, she had not thought much about the sisters, but it was 1866, and she had heard of how the war left the South. With all the war wounded, surely the sisters had not starved. They knew too much. But Madge needed to know for certain how they’d fared. Now that she’d asked the doctor to help find Hemp’s wife, she could go home without regret.

  “You’re leaving because I stopped you from selling out of my kitchen,” Sadie said.

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Walker, but the truth is your threats don’t disturb my sleep.”

  “You’re leaving with that man.”

  “What?”

  “He’s not worth your trouble, Madge.”

  Madge’s face dropped. “Hush your mouth.”

  “I know things about him. Things you don’t know.”

  “Hush your mouth.”

  “The spirit showed me. Something happened between him and his wife’s daughter.”

  “Are they alive?”

  “I don’t know, and I can’t figure out what happened exactly. I just know it was something wrong.”

  “Is his wife alive?”

  “Don’t you hear me? I don’t know who is alive and who isn’t. As soon as the spirit came, I didn’t want to hear. I’ve had enough of secrets. What I can tell you is that the man is not worth it.”

  Madge’s voice lowered to a whisper. “You a mean, vile woman. Just like the sisters.”

  “I’m not too fond of you, either.”

  “Good enough.”

  The widow moved from the leather chair to her desk. “I will make all the arrangements for your trip.”

  “You ain’t got to do that.”

  Sadie pulled a piece of paper from the drawer of an end table. “Consider it your final pay.”

  Madge was too enraged to thank her. This woman didn’t know Hemp at all. How dare she say those things about him? That girl had tried something on him, and he had resisted. Damn them two women for haunting her the way they did.

  But maybe the widow had seen something more than he’d told her. Had Hemp been truthful about everything? Madge’s hands started to shake.

  As she stood there watching the widow scribble something on paper, she thought: I’m tired of doctoring on everybody except my own self. She’d told Hemp to heal himself. And he had lied to her about what happened with that girl. Wasn’t it time she looked after herself for a change? When she said the widow had become like family, Hemp had laughed out loud. Ain’t no white woman your family, girl, he’d said.

  Such truth from a liar’s mouth.

  Madge’s feelings about the woman might have been complicated, but one thing was certain: she had to leave. She had to get away from both Sadie and Hemp. Neither one was good for her.

  20

  STRUCK BY A FEELING THAT THE DOOR TO THE HOUSE on Ontario Street swung both ways, Sadie had not been surprised by the letter from York telling of her father’s arrival date. When Samuel died, James and Madge appeared. Her mother’s passing brought on Michael. And now her father was due to arrive that very day and Sadie hastened to write a treaty in the back of a carriage.

  The nation’s war was over, but not the one between father and daughter. As Richard drove her to the train station to meet him, Sadie was thinking of treaties and the complications of peacemaking. First, there was the how. Would it be words and would they be spo
ken or written? Would it be actions, a change of course? Then there was the what: what to say and do. Inevitably, there would be costs, concessions, sacrifices. Mistakes were made. Lines were drawn. In the end, one would be right, the other wrong.

  For God’s sake, what could possibly cause a change of heart in that man? And how exactly was she supposed to navigate this pathway of egos? She did not know what to do. She tried to think of what she’d learned from her books. Some wars ended long before the document was signed, before the meetings in Paris or Ghent. Others resolved with a white flag, a throwing up of hands in a temporary cease-fire, or a frustrated sign of surrender. The lingering question of what to do with the captured, the wounded. Where would the treaty be signed? Who would be the first to put away their purse of hurt? Her father, hoping for a son, instead received a daughter with a man inside. A traitorous ventriloquist. And now she, entrusted with the paper on which they would write the next chapter, left to find a single voice and draw up the outline.

  She placed a hand over her chest. This was a complicated affair, this peacemaking. Yet reconciliation was necessary. Though he had been the one to betray, she would be the one to end it. He was her only family. She had no choice.

  With their husbands dead and gone, many of the widows who visited the parlor had been left destitute or burdened with debt, their faces revealing this: An earthly passing was like the expiration of some essential truth one has always held dear. Things were not as they seemed. You were not who you thought you were. But what did it mean when the truth shifted and there was no death to bear the blame?

  The carriage stopped in front of the train depot, but Sadie was still thinking of how to make peace.

  A FLOCK OF BIRDS SCATTERED. Hat pulled low, she furtively watched the people around her. Some stood near traveling cases. Others wore expressions cloaked in anticipation. A woman in a lavender mourning dress clutched a fidgeting child’s hand. A man perched on a well-worn valise, legs wide as he tipped back and forth, threads swinging loosely from the edge of his jacket. Sadie fanned herself.