Outside, the pastor shook Daniel’s hand again, and Ruth slipped away so that Daniel could explain that she was no child but a legal wife. She drifted over to the pastor’s missus and spoke to her, and when Daniel next saw her she was waiting quietly at the wagon, hands clasped at her waist. “We can stop at the pastor’s for a butter churn,” she said with a pleased intake of breath.
“Now then, what have you done, Ruth Boyd?”
The Doughertys lived in a frame house four miles east. From it, the pastor covered a circuit of some fifty miles in the course of a month. He and his wife had given up their cow. “I haven’t the time these days,” Missus Dougherty had explained to Ruth, “and would be glad to buy butter.” At the kitchen door, she invited the Dickinsons in, but they stood in a kind of supplication until she pointed to a shed where she stored the unused churn. “I could take five pounds on a weekly basis,” she said proudly. “I so often send Mister Dougherty out on his travels with bread for the people who house him on his circuit and of course I like to bake for the church women.”
Daniel went to the shed, which was a jumble of broken tools, barrows, the churn, and a milking stool. He put his head out and asked if they might … and held up the stool while Missus Dougherty nodded vigorously.
“We have only the one cow,” Daniel reminded Ruth as they rode home with the churn rolling noisily in the wagon bed. “Although Tick is a fine Alderney, to be sure.”
“A fine Alderney, to be sure,” Ruth sniffed because even at the pastor’s house Daniel had not seen fit to clarify her position. Miss Dickinson, she had been called, and again Daniel had not bothered to correct that mistaken impression.
At home Mary had been making a meal of pancakes. She had tried to make burnt sugar syrup and had succeeded well enough that the boys thought the churn must be something to celebrate. The family sat around the outdoor fire on this Sunday afternoon and ate pancakes and felt the sun bright and warm on their faces. Daniel leaned back on his elbows and stretched out his legs. He was growing accustomed to life on the ground, but he thought of Rebecca’s way of sitting so very straight on a chair and that led him to a memory of her graceful, sliding walk and the way she had handed him his china plate and silver fork the day they met. Then he remembered that it was Luveen who had brought the plate and wondered why had he changed the truth of it. He must be careful about his memories and keep them pure. He must remember the lurch of pleasure he had felt in his breast, sitting across from Rebecca on her painted chair, and the way his gaze had travelled up her arm from wrist to shoulder and then to blue-eyed face. Their eyes had met and she had winked and all of it had happened in the space of the longest minute of his life. Whether cake or lace had been served, it had been done with a sly, teasing manner that had made him lonely for her before he had left her presence. For weeks after that, he had been in an agony that he had no name for, calling to mind her voice and gestures and a certain weather that seemed to encircle her. He believed that he had courted her diligently, and finally won her hand, having no idea that she had set her cap for him from the start or that her father had never been averse to the union. Daniel, younger than Rebecca by three years, was a second cousin to John Dickinson, who had signed the constitution and helped compose the first amendment. John Dickinson was now president of Pennsylvania and a worthy relation in any case. In terms of the family business, Daniel could be moulded. He would raise the children as living parts of God. But look at them, Daniel thought, sitting around a fire like Red Indians. He thought that if Rebecca were among them, she would be mortified by their sudden lack of station. Eating from their hands. Chewing with mouths open. And they had forgotten to pray. He looked at Ruth in her straw hat. All the way home, she hadn’t spoken to him. Now she was sitting on a log with her legs stuck out in front of her laughing at something Benjamin was saying. He tried to imagine his beautiful wife – his other wife – in such a place as this. Sitting on a log … Then he saw the purple ribbon on Ruth’s straw hat blow across her laughing face and felt a pang of surprising desire.
Made of cedar staves and bound with smooth brass hoops, the churn was Ruth’s first true possession and she carried it down to the creek and scrubbed it with sand, studying the lid with its hole in the centre and the smooth, round dash with its crossed wood staves. She filled the churn with water, seized the dash, and jolted it up and down, imagining all the gold that was to come. Gold to be turned into nails. Gold for Miss Patch. And a plow. The afternoon was warm and Ruth unbuttoned her dress and patted the creek water on her face and neck. The water was pleasure. The solitude was luxury. Looking around, she pulled the dress over her head, unbuttoned her boots, and took off her woollen stockings. Now, wearing only a shift and bloomers, she left the churn behind on the bank and stepped into the water, which was cold even in summer.
Never having been in a body of water larger than a tub, Ruth moved cautiously, feeling the chill move up her legs and numb them strangely. Under her bare feet the rocks of a thousand years rolled and she slipped and yelped as she lost her footing and went in up to her neck. The water was not very deep and she began to trust it slightly, feet still on the ground and moving upstream. Taking tiny steps, heart racing, feet clinging, she let the water push her back a little, then grabbed at the sand and stones with her toes and moved ahead slowly, hearing the rapids in the distance, pushing and gliding farther and farther from known safety.
A picture came to her for no reason. The poorhouse. Matron. Such a tall woman she had seemed to Ruth, with furrowed brow and pointing fingers. Yet Ruth had admired her. She bore herself from one place to another with such authority, making everyone around her seem small by contrast. Ruth would never be such a woman, as she had no height, no bravery. She put her mouth in the rushing water to drink and pretended she was a bird. Birds made ferocious melody. She listened, heard a mockingbird, and drank again. What song was he singing? Clouds flitted. Leaves trembled. The water was solid, hard as a wall. She moved along carefully, pushing against the current. It might have sent her shooting back to the beginning of everything except that she clung to the bed of the creek with her toes, amphibious. Holding time, holding place. I will never see Matron again, she thought. There was a pool under the rapids but she could not move against the rush of water to enter it. The rapids were becoming more and more decisive. Using her arms and feet, she tried to push, inch by inch, as if the destination mattered, cresting an underwater mound of rock where the water was speaking its multitudinous language. Speak out, she heard as she closed her eyes. The voice was whispery but clear in its meaning. She let her feet and legs float up to the surface outstretched. She lay back and opened her eyes, floating backward, staring at overhanging cottonwoods that doubled and tripled themselves on the water’s surface. One bent branch held a shivering shape that made the leaves dance and Ruth studied that shape with a jangle of nerves almost ecstatic.
Speak out.
“There was someone in a tree talkin at me from above,” she reported to Daniel when she had floated back to her skirt and shoes and bodice and cap and apron and dressed by the water’s edge on the marshy bank. “Talkin and I never said a thing.” She’d found Daniel in the company of Simus, looking at the four growing-up pigs.
“You were dazed by the cold of the water.”
“It was saying for me to speak out, but why? What did it mean?”
Daniel stared at the pigs.
“It was a sweet voice, very natural but strange.”
Simus sucked in his breath, hung his head, and said, “I prays.” Or perhaps he said, “I praise.”
Ruth said, “I was on the watertop and I don’t know how to swim and I was held up.” She saw that the boy was attentive to that, his look showing a new regard for her that allowed her to think, as she set out across the meadow, which had earlier been a bog and which was now covered in wild flowers, yellow and white and pink, that she had been visited by some unearthly form of grace. And it must have been for a reason, she thought. It must have bee
n a message, she said to herself as she took up the churn without feeling its weight. Then she stopped in her tracks, listening to the boy’s hobbling gait behind her. The sun was lowering in the sky and she dropped the churn and walked ahead while he stopped, picked up the churn, and followed her with his limp.
“We’re to have nails,” she said over her shoulder. “You get to makin shingles with Mister Jones’s knife now.” A slave was lower than an orphan, and this one limped behind her and when she got to the half-built house he put the churn down and waited while she sent Isaac to the box in the wagon to find the borrowed shingle knife. “Tonight you sleep out here longside your pa,” she said to Isaac. “I need more space in the bed.” She found the milking pail and went to Tick as she did every day at this time. She saw again in her mind the vision in the tree, dancing, jittery, and sat down on the milking stool with the thought of it in her head. She had been to church with her husband, met the pastor’s wife, acquired a stool and a churn, and been visited by a presence that had spoken a message in words. Speak out. She laid her river-washed face against the cow’s flank while her hands pulled at the teats and the teats released warm, yellow milk. The world was rearranged, dusted, and shined.
Standing against the wall of the lean-to, Simus said, “I to put all cream in the holy water before butter makin.”
Ruth stared at him and saw that he was right, although she did not like his watching or his interference. She did not like his skin, which was night-coloured and unsavoury. She had never known a black man of any kind. She had known Luveen for a time, but that was different. She saw that this slave boy was drawn to participate in something that was hers alone, yet she acknowledged his reverence. Without his tears in the timber lot, she might not have understood the importance of the angel’s words. Angel, it must have been. Finished with the cow she got up, pointed to the pail, then walked away while into a pitcher Simus poured enough milk for supper, then covered the pail with a cloth and took it away to cool. Tomorrow he would skim the milk and put the cream in the old Pennsylvania crock. The crock would be set between river rocks to make holy the cream inside.
Ruth was ready with five pounds of butter by the end of the week and there was still milk for the family. Would Daniel drive her to the pastor’s? Daniel hitched Mulberry to the wagon and found an errand to do in town. “I was visited by an angel the other day,” Ruth told the pastor’s wife.
Missus Dougherty raised an eyebrow.
“At our creek, ma’am. And this here butter got cooled in the waters right under her wings. She was high up a tree, just restin for a bit.” Ruth was surprisingly composed at this moment. Her unruly hair was shoved under a cap, and while her apron was somewhat stained, her face was without a single doubt.
Missus Dougherty put a finger in the butter and then in her mouth. “Well, it’s tasty, I’ll say that. But do not go boasting to the pastor of your angel, Miss Dickinson. It will get him riled up.”
Ruth said, “Missus Dickinson, ma’am.”
Missus Dougherty glanced at Ruth’s waistline.
“I be married from a church and unspoiled to this day,” Ruth assured her.
Missus Dougherty was to have a social gathering the next day, and there it was heralded that the young Missus Dickinson had been visited by a spirit of some kind on Sunday afternoon at Sawmill Creek where she lived married but as chaste as God had made her. “Untouched!” crowed the pastor’s wife. “If you can imagine, and her husband must be passing strange.” Bringing forth the biscuits she had made for the occasion, Missus Dougherty went on to say, “The preserves are mine, dear friends, but the butter was fanned by an angel’s wings. A talking angel, apparently.”
“Since when?” Missus Jones wanted to know. “I know that creek pretty good, I should think, and no such being has yet spoke to me.”
Each of the five ladies who had gathered in the modest parlour put a pat of the butter on a biscuit. Each of them took a bite. “It is,” Missus Sharpe then offered, “unlike other butters. Isn’t it?”
“It’s heavenly,” said Missus Craig decisively and added, “Must be a Jersey cow. It was my husband who surveyed that land. And the creek.” She nodded solemnly.
Missus Dougherty said, “We’ll call it Heavenly Butter.”
“Is that sacrilegious?”
“It’s an adjective, Missus Craig.”
“Healing and Heavenly. That might be better.”
“She could start a going business.”
Missus Jones fanned herself impatiently.
Missus Fox stood up. “Well, I’ll say it right out. This is plain Dickinson mischief, is all it is. First, he bought the land from Mister Jones to squeeze us out and now Mister Dickinson and his little wife bought out Mister Shoffert and have us surrounded on all sides. Next he took our water access that you sold to him!” She directed a glare at Missus Jones. “And now this, about spirits! Ghosts in our water. As if any Christian could believe such heathen hokum meant only to scare us off our place altogether.”
Missus Sharpe said with an edge in her voice, “An angel would not scare a Christian.”
Missus Jones said, “You have the accessing to water, Missus Fox, and why should they want to scare a good neighbour away, if it is a good neighbour?”
Missus Dougherty began to fear that her party was dissolving in acrimony. She shook a finger at the gathered ladies to show her disappointment, but Missus Fox would not be stopped. “So as to get our land, which is smack in the middle of what they got from your husband and that Mister Shoffert, who has got no wife.”
Missus Jones, the good German immigrant, looked at Missus Fox without a blink. She picked up her coffee, which was weaker in body than she liked, and took a good swallow of it to calm herself. What she knew of her Quaker neighbours was too little to make any meaning of their designs, but she had sometimes considered their plight with sympathy and now she put her cup in its saucer with a little clatter.
“They are stealing my house girl too!” said Missus Fox to prove her point.
Missus Dougherty said firmly, “Surely not. Missus Dickinson is raising up five orphans. She needs all the help we can provide.”
“She has such an uncomplicated temperament,” said Missus Sharpe cheerily. “I find it hard to imagine she has motives.”
“And it’s such nice butter,” said Missus Craig.
“Made in a churn that was mine until last Sunday,” Missus Dougherty noted, with a hint of warning to the doubters. “And I’m set to help her make a business of it. That was an inspired idea you had, Missus Craig.”
Later that day, the pastor’s wife took her buggy out to the Dickinson place, where the sight of three children playing listlessly in the hot shade confirmed the sympathy she had felt for the stepmother. The girl had taken on this horde while denying herself her husband’s embrace. Unspoiled, she had said of herself. Chaste. And there she was on the very milking stool that had stood in the Dougherty shed unused for more than a year. Mister Dickinson was sawing a board and a darkie was shaving shingles by the unfinished house. A lump of infant lay in a hammock under a tree and a lass with dirty hair, stringy and uncombed, was chopping at the carcass of a rabbit that lay on a board across her knees. None of this was immediately surprising to Missus Dougherty, but she saw that there was no proper house and noticed that the family was entirely bereft of adults except for the young father, since even the darkie was merely a tall, limping boy.
She had come in a buggy and was still sitting in it when Daniel put down his saw and approached. An odd fellow, she thought, to marry a girl so young, who can hardly be useful to him. Missus Dougherty allowed Daniel to help her out of the buggy, saying that she wished only a few scant words with his wife. Holding her skirt up in one hand, she said, “I mistook her for a child, Mister Dickinson, but I was wrong in that.”
The Purchase Page 8