Ruth moved the paddle. “Better wait til you’re growed to wear it.”
“I said I can just wear a sash and tie it up.” Mary looked at Ruth coldly. “There’s a way to make butter come fast, but I guess you don’t know it.”
“My butter comes just fine.”
Mary began swirling. She got the skirt of the blue dress in a spin so that her bloomers were showing. “Come, butter, come!” She clicked her heels. “Peter’s waiting at the gate. For a butter cake.” She dipped, lifted her arms up over her head. “Come, butter, come.”
Ruth said, “Oh, I do feel it thicken, my Lord, yes.”
Mary came closer, surprised to hear the Lord’s name taken in vain.
“My Lord!” said Ruth again. “It’s comin so fast now it’s a plain miracle.” She jerked her arms up and down. “Try it for yourself.” She let go of the paddle and sat back, glad to straighten her shoulders and rest her arms while Mary grabbed the paddle and thrust it up and down.
“I did not even feel it before,” Mary said sharply, “so how am I to know?”
Ruth said, “Well, this butter business is growing so busy I might need a partner to share the profit if I could find someone qualified. Do you know a thing more about butter than for a rhyme?” She looked at the dress and pulled her eyes away, for the sight hurt her strangely.
“I am too occupied with everything a mother should be doing, Ruth Boyd.”
“Down in the timber lot all day.”
“Why not have Simus for your partner? You only need someone to churn for you and wrap butter in bits of waxed paper. It’s nothing.”
“And he’s surely underworked, lying on his back with his feet up while a girl who should know better carries his food to him.”
“Maybe you don’t like him because he reminds you of being our servant, Ruth Boyd. But if he had a paying job, he could buy his freedom.”
“It is the definement of a slave to work with no pay. And why should I care to lose him now that he can get up and walk and do for us as he should?” A whippoorwill called out the end of day from the ancient, unstoppable forest. They were far from other people, other families. It was that first summer of sewn-together days.
“Kill the hog as the days turn cold,” Simus said. “First we to hoist him up on a rack and later the meat kin sit in salt and we to wash it down and coat it good to hang bove a fire of hickry chips.” It was the longest speech the boy had ever made.
So. They would hang the meat, salt it, and render the lard. They would pray for a cold winter to keep the meat from spoiling. It would make for a celebration of their first year in Virginia, but they must make a place for butchering where a hog could be hung high enough to be gutted. Explaining this, Simus pointed out that the pigs had been the best investment the Dickinsons could have made. “Costn no teng,” he said. “And grub fer free.”
Daniel did not like to say what he had paid for the pigs, but he was bound to admit he knew nothing of butchering or salting or smoking.
Simus said, “Leavm ta me for I kin do all an make soap an tallow for the missus.”
As if the gods had no hand in this, the four pigs continued to snort and scramble in the woods, bumping and chasing and squealing with pointed ears upright. Their mottled skins were camouflage. They came back to the hut each night replenished, and Simus found comfort in their snorts and firm bellies but Daniel now ordered the children to stay away from the pigs and out of the timber lot, wanting no sentiment when it came to butchering.
“But, Papa,” Isaac argued, “Hiram and Martha and Corry and Bathsheba are my friends. They will be sad if I don’t come down to visit as I always do and it is bad for pigs to be sad. What if they forget to eat?”
Hiram. Corry. Daniel asked who had named the pigs. He was up early putting shingles on the roof of his house. “Isaac, you must wean yourself of connection to the animals, as they are all to be eaten one of these days. That is their purpose. In a few days, your Hiram will be butchered so that we may survive the winter. You must not consider the animals over yourself. It is God’s plan for us to have dominion and not to live among the beasts as friends. Would you climb up here and help me with the roofing?”
Isaac thought of Hiram’s round snout and the pink lining of his ears. He thought of the long face and pocketed eyes, which blinked at him. He tried not to cry, but the pain in his chest was more than he could bear without tears and he let them roll out of his eyes and down his cheeks. For the first time, his father had invited him to participate in a thing he had desperately wanted all summer – to be part of the house building. Now, if he climbed up to feel the new roof under his boots, to look down the chimney hole, to look out beyond the lot and the road, he would be agreeing to the murder of his friend. His father had laid a trap for him and scaling the wall of the house would mean that he could never complain. Then he wondered, How much would it help Hiram if he turned away from his father now? And if he couldn’t help Hiram, was an act of defiance worth the loss of that rooftime vantage?
In the meadow, Simus was building a hog hoist, stopping occasionally to gaze at his hut, for within it there had been a visitor the night before. “My life was once safe,” Bett had told him when he asked about her past. “In the first house, I played with my mistress’s children and never thought about it twice. My grandmother schooled me to read and write and heal the sick.”
Simus had asked if their people were the same.
“I cannot tell,” she answered quietly. “My grandmother came from a land she called Guinea, where she was kidnapped.” Then, while she checked the wound on his leg and the strength of the bone she had knit back together, she told him of the place she lived now and the trouble she knew there. Only a little time they’d spent like that for soon enough she had taken her shortcut back, moving fast out of fear. Otherwise, as she said, there would be no breakfast on the stove making its goodness felt, no clothes being pulled out of the cupboard for the children to wear, no Bible set out for Mister Fox to read out loud to his family. She told him this too: that the two girls were under her direction, along with the cleaning of the house, the laundering and cooking, the mending and spinning. And when there was sickness in the quarters, she was sent out to the fields to make the workers well, for her grandmother had died a little time ago. Gone all night! Not come back! That’s what they would say if she stayed and what would then happen was not to be imagined, she had said, although he knew enough about such things. She had to get back, but Simus could gaze at the hut where he lived in wonderment that it had been ever so briefly shared.
Mary went on with her teaching, and Isaac tended the pigs, and Benjamin and Jemima, still too young to wander, stayed close to Ruth, who had the care of sickly Joseph and the garden and the chickens and Tick, the good cow, as well as the fast-growing butter business. Sometimes she took herself down to a certain place on the bank of the creek to wait for encouragement, but the shivering angel never came.
One bright afternoon in October, Jester Fox rode up to the Dickinson house in a roll of red dust. Daniel had put up a second notice at the trading post and he listened to the hoof beats on his road, hoping it was his north-side neighbour come at last.
Acreage for sale. Inquire D. Dickinson Wilderness Road
As Daniel stood forth, Jester Fox arrived with angry shouts. “Come down here, you land-grabbin-sonofaweasel!” The horse foamed and snorted.
Daniel had turned sheet white and was already wringing his hands. He had been piling up stones, intending to speak to this neighbour about his chimney as well as the Shoffert land. It was imperative, now that autumn had come, to finish the house and create a source of heat.
“Your nigger bigged my house girl!” Fox bellowed. He grabbed his hat, crushed it in his hands, and began beating it against his leg while the gelding pawed at the ground and pranced, pulled at the mouth by hard-held reins.
“Surely not,” Daniel croaked. “Onesimus lives close by, with an injured limb, which would never carry him as far
as your place.” He wanted to say, Nor would he do such a thing, but he found that he wasn’t sure of that. His hands now dangled at his sides. His heart was fast. His small sons were hiding under the porch near his feet. He must stop shaking and find some authority within, although he had no idea where to look for it.
Fox shouted, “Tha limb must be mended good enough to climb on a girl and fornicate her!” and went on hitting his leg with the crumpled hat and biting his red moustache.
Daniel watched his neighbour with a growing fear. This was a situation beyond his experience or reckoning.
“I require twenty dollas here and now to recompense.”
“Recompense?” Daniel found his voice. “I say it is not possible for Onesimus to walk so far as to your place, but if it is true that he did so, has he not enriched you by one, providing you with yet another unfortunate piece of living property?” Daniel hoped the listening children had not taken his meaning, but he could not calm his sense of outrage. Under the porch, the two little boys must be gazing out in terror at the horse, which had reared up now and was pawing at the air close to their hiding place. Astride the horse, Jester Fox had become half-man half-beast, but when the hooves hit the ground and the man jumped off, Isaac crawled out from under the porch and ran to him with doubled-up fists. “Don’t touch my papa!” he cried. “Or I will kill thee!”
Daniel looked at his child in stunned horror. He had raised his children devotedly as pacifists and now one of them had uttered words of mortal aggression. He stepped off his porch and strode over to Isaac, grabbing his shoulder, telling him to apologize instantly.
Isaac shook his head.
Jester Fox sneered. “Brave little man you got there, but I want my twenty dollas and your nig to beat alongside of mine.”
Daniel, who believed there were times in his life when his pacifism was encouraged by weakness, advanced a step toward his neighbour, aware that his sons were watching, that he must master his fear and stop his trembling. “Neither one nor the other,” he said, but the voice that came out of him was now puny to his own ears.
Jester Fox spat out a spiral of tobacco juice. “You think I’m bat blind to your policies? I seen you take Shoffert’s land so’s to keep me small. I seen you buy up my water rights to drive me off. And now it’s my girl servin’ as your strumpet!” The red hair on his head stood out stiff as wire and his face was splotched under the skin. “Which of you goes first on her, I wonder, you or the nig?”
Daniel felt rage come in a flood. “If the girl is what you say, you cannot blame Onesimus!” It was wicked to win his argument at the cost of the girl’s honour, but it was what the loosened rage demanded. He heard the word tarnation escape his lips and clamped them shut.
Jester Fox thrust out his arm and struck his hat across Daniel’s face.
Seeing nothing, feeling nothing, Daniel stepped back. It was the first chance he’d had in his life to turn the other cheek but that did not occur to him. His mind was blank. Then his heart resumed its loud beating. He had not considered Jester Fox to be a danger, but now he saw the edge of violence in himself and it was terrifying.
“I coulda bought up this place,” Fox snarled.
“But you did not,” Daniel threw back. “Nor will you set foot on this land again or rue the day!” It was not fear he felt now but untempered, untrammelled fury, which is the arsenal of the devil, he told himself, and I have entered his range.
“I catch her over here, I’ll hang your nig’s festerin cock up a tree,” Jester Fox stuttered, and he went back to his horse and took hold of the reins and pulled himself into the saddle almost gracefully, looking around just long enough to take in the unfinished state of the house, which was entered by climbing two bare wooden planks. He saw that an empty window sat on one side of the door braced by its sash. And there was no chimney, only a pile of stones on the ground varied in size and shape. “I’ll be waitin for the twenty dollas and the nigger to be brought,” he growled. “But I’ll not wait for more’n a day.”
Mary, Ruth, and Jemima had heard every word of this awful encounter while standing inside, behind the door, and they had felt variously about Daniel’s response to their neighbour’s threats. Jemima believed her father to be brave. Mary was glad of his lack of violence and surprised by his rage. But Ruth was ashamed, for she had expected Daniel to leap on Jester Fox and prove his strength. Instead, she had seen only cowardice.
That night, when the moon was high enough, Daniel left the cabin, believing everyone to be asleep. Listening to leaves crunch under his boots and feeling a thorn come through the sole of one of them, he stopped to pull it out and found himself on his knees in the crackle of all the living and dying life around him. He was not a man to put words to his prayers, but he gave his whole weight to the ground and felt it push back. He let the muscles of his calves relax, slid the tops of his boots around on the elements – soil and pokeweed and grass and leaf. He put his wandering thought to the two slaves and considered their form, which was human, and their needs, which matched his own in so many ways, believing they, too, must contain a spark of the divine. This thought brought him comfort and many minutes passed before he stood up in his boots again and saw that the dark had come on fast, as if answering some need he had not expressed. Now he could move stealthily, feeling his way through the trees, limb by limb and trunk by trunk, for he knew the feel of each of these parts of the path. He had given Simus a lamp, but there was no light inside the little hut and no sound, so the boy must be well asleep. Simus had been recently feeding the pigs an allowance of corn, justifying this by explaining the benefits. “Soon tha hog to be dress and salted down,” he’d said. “He to be smoke afta the brine form up and I build a smoke house for him.” The boy was excited about his venture and this was all very well, even admirable, but Simus must atone for the advantage taken of an unknowing girl and the cost to Daniel’s standing in the newly made community. Double shame it was, and reprimand must be meted out or Simus would not comprehend the serious nature of his wanton conduct. Or was conduct the appropriate word? As he crept through the underbrush surrounding the meagre hut he had built over the boy, Daniel wondered if the two young slaves even understood the act that had created yet another unfortunate soul to be enslaved by a man without heart or decency, a man to be loathed although the gospels taught otherwise. How could he love his neighbour? How could he turn the other cheek? Conduct. He turned his tongue around the word. It was likely the boy and girl had coupled out of lonely instinct, like wild animals, for that is what they were, lacking all education and refinement, lacking even self-respect. Without learning and understanding, how is conduct possible since it requires intention?
Under the canvas door, the opening was fenced halfway up so that the pigs, full grown now, could not escape. It is the chain of life, Daniel thought tiredly, one kept by another by another and by another. He had the fleeting impression that he, too, was a slave to something, but in a moment that impression was lost in his surprise at finding the hut empty except for the softly grunting and snorting pigs.
What if the boy had word of the girl’s situation and had gone to her on his limping leg? Daniel pulled the canvas back over the hut’s opening and rushed back to the house, which he did not enter. Instead, he saddled Mulberry quickly and took to the road, which was bare and moonlit.
Unaccustomed to night rides, the horse thudded heavily through the dark, flaring her nostrils and heaving her chest. The full moon was in a fit of fast swimming across the sky, moving among the scuttling clouds as if it were buoyant. In its bright light, Daniel made out a hobbling shape on the road ahead and pulling up next to it saw that he had caught up with Simus. “What are you doing out with that shingle knife?” he demanded.
Simus had the knife in his left hand and a walking stick held like a cane in his right. The knife reflected moonlight and starlight on its angled blade. Old men, too feeble to swing an axe, were given this tool to split kindling. It was used to split barrel hoops and lath
flats and willow poles and none of these employments explained the boy’s walking out with it on the road at night. Simus said nothing.
“On your way to the Fox place, is it? To cause yet more trouble? Do you want to endanger that girl further?” Daniel got down from the horse and stood facing the boy, clenching his teeth and wanting to grab Simus as he had grabbed Isaac earlier in the day. “Listen now!” He reached out, holding his eyes on the boy’s starched face. “Give over that knife.”
Simus stepped back, reckoning his chances at anything but death now, anything but death including flight. He raised the knife.
Daniel made himself louder. “Listen hard and believe. I will act on the girl’s behalf.” He paused and drew breath and thought that Simus could not know what he meant however hard he listened. He took the boy by an elbow so that the walking stick dangled from his hand. “Hear me now. Hear me now … Jester Fox is raging. Go home. Go back. This is an order I give.”
The boy pulled his arm away and with the lifted blade struck his right hand so suddenly that for a long moment, the blade hung in the flesh, wavering. Pierced through the meat between thumb and forefinger, the hand was nailed to the walking stick. “He always takin her,” Simus said, looking down at the hand. In sorrow, in defeat, he turned his face left and right. The walking stick fell with a hollow clank and Daniel watched the boy’s blood dripping onto the road, watched it illumined by the moonlight as it made a dark pool at their feet. He did not for an instant believe what the boy had said about Jester Fox, but the smell of blood and the thought of such unworthy lust sickened him. He remembered then that Fox had accused him of the selfsame crime, but it was too much to think about or examine. “You’ve given yourself a terrible wound,” he muttered, swallowing the bile that had risen in his throat. But why? Why? Would a dog or a wild animal do such a thing? There seemed to be nothing with which to stanch the flow of blood, for it did not occur to Daniel to remove his own shirt.
The Purchase Page 10