The hand, lowered now, was gushing dangerously and Simus did not make a sound, although he still held the bloodied shingle knife.
“An injury to thyself pains the Lord,” Daniel whispered. He had forgotten the quiet intensity of his prayer in the timber lot. “Take Mulberry home,” he said. “I will walk on to the Fox place to see how things stand with the girl.”
It was a week after the purchase of the blue dress that this incident on the road occurred, although the second thing did not follow the first in any logical sequence. Certainly there was no cause, no effect. First the dress had been bought and given away, the butter had been churned to a chant, and then Jester Fox had arrived, struck Daniel with his folded hat, and Daniel had left the house late at night. Must events be related? The moon, full and stately, was still swimming through the clouds as Daniel trudged along the road. He kept his hands behind him as if they were chained and his head down, as if every stone on the road must be studied as a potential piece of chimney. Simus was turned toward home and surely Jester Fox would … what? Daniel’s thoughts moved like the moon, in and out of possibilities. He thought of the girl’s face the only time he had seen it. She was not much older than Mary. Or Ruth. And what if Fox had been using her as Simus proclaimed? Such things were said to happen on the plantations, where wealth had stolen the Holy Spirit from certain owners and turned their hearts to wretchedness, but out here in the woods of southwest Virginia, where they were all struggling to civilize the very ground where they walked, where they were required to live as Christians together or descend into chaos … out here, it was unthinkable that a man on his own home place with a young and helpless servant and a nearby wife in his bed … and children … The walk seemed to take forever. It was the Lord protecting him, giving him time to meditate. What if Simus had told an untruth to besmirch the girl’s owner and clear himself? On and on, this walking. If thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone … It was a mile or so between houses, going by road. If he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother … What if Simus had visited Bett by crossing the creek? The road dipped and swayed. Jester Fox had accused Daniel of taking the girl himself. Those coarse words were beyond comprehension. Unless his neighbour was familiar with such a crime. The moon rose higher and peered all the way down to the place, somewhere behind him, where there must still be a pool of shining blood as if the earth had received a wound. No cede malis, he whispered. What if events were shaped by conditions rather than faith?
Finally the Fox place could be viewed from the stony road as he scuffed along it. The small house stood stark and creamy against the night, lit by the sky as everything was but reflecting that light like another white moon. Daniel felt the strain in his thighs as he pushed them harder and faster uphill. Awake is what he wanted Jester Fox to be. And asleep, all the rest of them. Four that he knew of: Jester Fox and two almost-grown sons and a wife. But there might be smaller children so he must not frighten them. And where did the housegirl sleep? He thought of the threat Jester Fox had made. A beating. And the girl was with child. Still, he must not plead overmuch for her rights but instead make a case for the innocence of the two child-slaves. He would point out that a girl of such tender years could no more know what she was about than one of their own daughters. No, he would liken her to a young horse, as the comparison to a daughter might ignite things further. He would say that Simus had been injured and that her heart had surely gone out to him and that the two of them had been lonely for company of their own kind. He would remind Jester Fox that such children as they were knew nothing of consequence to their acts.
As he came to the slope of land that held up the house, Daniel measured the distance from road to door and back to road again, as if he might have to find his way out quickly, remembering thickets and holes and making no false steps. He walked across the open ground without any sign of hesitation, although he felt now a great desire to stand and think out his argument. The reason the girl must not be punished or the boy either … neither of them. And what of recompense? A hound barked fitfully and howled with malice or longing. It made the hair rise up on the back of Daniel’s neck. The moon made a fool of him, standing so stark on the yellowed grass.
Inside the house, a lamp was put out and the front door opened a crack. “Who’s out here?”
“I am here to inquire after the girl,” Daniel replied unsteadily.
“And why should you bother when all her trouble be the fault of yourn?”
“Come now,” said Daniel, “let us help each other in this matter and seek the best outcome for everyone.” In the dew-covered yard, the moon lit up trees and slender stalks of wild grass as if there must be something in all of it worth seeing while Fox stood in a narrow opening that emitted no light. “I would speak to her,” said Daniel, coming fully up the porch steps. But as he reached for the door, he felt a shove at his shoulder and stumbled backward, then lay flat on the ground that had slammed into him, trying to catch his breath. The door shut loudly. The sky was written with stars. The moon had taken itself to some corner above or lowered itself into a patch of branches, but the stars kept poking at the dark, making breathless spotted light.
He pushed himself up, brushed off his shirt, and found his way around to the back of the house. There, behind the washtubs, was a shack and he stood for a minute, looking, then walked over to the thin wall of boards and knocked. A moment passed. Hearing nothing, he pushed at the door but there was only a heap of matting on the floor, nothing else. He thought of the place where Simus slept, realizing it bore a resemblance to this, and wondered if he and his neighbour were similar in a way he hadn’t noticed. He smelled the close air of the shack and quickly dismissed this thought because he was seeking to protect a girl without anything to be gained by doing so while Jester Fox was surely lost to all decency.
Stepping outside and glancing toward the house, which, without the moon, still reflected the light as if it bore witness, he moved into the bushes at the edge of the yard and felt his way back to the road, sore inside and out.
He could not remember what it was he had planned to do.
Wishing he had told Simus to bring the wagon and then remembering the injured hand, he thought what a bother the owning of someone could be. A hired man would be sent home during illness. A hired man would have his own lodgings and family, whereas Simus was a dangerous, wilful child. Not an animal, after all, Daniel thought now, for an animal can be tamed. He came to the patch of blood on the road, still glistening. Then he heard a wolf howl in the distance and almost managed to laugh at himself. He was surrounded by the forces of nature. Even though the sons of Virginia had forged a great democratic union, the light of Christ had not been brought into these woods. He was walking on a path of blood. Jealousy and lust and pride and despair he had met in the last several hours and it was the woods and the fields and shadowy hills that provided the backdrop. He could not imagine that any wicked act could take place under a roof built by human hands.
Again, his prayers were wordless, but they addressed a heavenly parent who cared for the universe. He made this address less through thought than through the five senses. Or were there more than that? He stopped, gave himself over to inner and outer light. In the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, on his long walk home, he was magnified, taking in substance through every pore. Eyes closed, he took it in as a plant will absorb light. He smelled those plants, which imbued the air with their musk. He sensed the peace of animals in nests and holes. He tasted the coming of morning and heard the wind in the leaves. He felt in the soles of his feet the resistance of ground. In his back and hips he felt the weight of his bones while his skin was an instrument being thrummed. Then at last he opened his eyes. Nature must not be blamed. Only man betrayed his place in it. He took in the reappeared moon as a reminder of Christ.
I’ll go again tomorrow, he told himself. To make things right.
Reaching home, Daniel only glanced
at the house, although inside it was everything he valued, or so it seemed to him. He walked quickly past the shelter he had built for his family and into the low-lying meadow, which had lost its flowers but which was seeded with flowers to come. The slapping of a hat across a face – it was the first violence directed against him in his life and it had been followed by worse: that terrible accusation. The threat to Simus! The shove off the porch! Love thy neighbour, he told himself as an owl cried out from a thicket. Then all was quiet. The wind had stalled. The trees held their peace. The moon hung on thick, silent branches. He had found his direction and moved softly into the timber lot, where he could hear the four pigs rustling and snoring and a sadder sound rising in waves. When he pulled the canvas away from the hut’s opening, he saw Simus kneeling over a girl whose cries grew louder when Daniel hunched himself in to stare at her in amazement. His Quaker hat brushed against the canvas and fell off. “What is …?” The girl was huddled against a grumbling sow.
“She hurt bad, Masta.”
“Don’t call me that word.” Daniel saw that the boy’s right hand was wrapped in a piece of the girl’s torn skirt. He felt sweat on the back of his neck. “She must go back, Simus. Jester Fox will be out looking for her. This is a great danger to all of us!”
“She don.”
Daniel picked up his hat. “Simus, she must go home now before Jester Fox comes back here to do more damage.”
“She don go there.”
Daniel shivered. “But she belongs to Jester Fox,” he said meekly, for the idea of ownership revolted him and he had no wish to support it. Masta. “Do you see?” It was something between ordering and pleading. “It is breaking the law to keep her here.” He was law-abiding, after all, and harbouring a runaway was perhaps a capital offence. He thought of his father: firm abolitionist. All of his people. And himself. He knelt beside the girl, who was curled against the pig. He studied her face, which was unusual, with deep-set eyes and a flaring nose and angular jaw. It was a strong face, neither ugly nor beautiful to him, but impressive. On her head, the girl wore no kerchief in the way of a slave but her dress was torn from the making of the bandage and her skin, wherever it was visible, was swelling into welts. Daniel felt ashamed and found himself relenting somewhat. “No one knows of this hut for now,” he allowed quietly, letting his eyes rest on the injured girl. Relenting by a narrow margin is all it was. “But she must leave by dawn.”
On his knees, he backed out of the sorry shelter and found his way home, opening his door very quietly and climbing the ladder very slowly as he took off his worn black coat and hat, sign and symbol of his beliefs. His sons were spread across the mattress and he pushed them together to make space for himself, pulled off his shirt, then found his nightshirt under a pillow and pulled it on over his head. Cold was blowing into the house through the great gap in one wall. He must somehow build a chimney now without his neighbour’s help.
Now Daniel told Mary to keep the children close to the house. He said it with emphasis in order that there be no misunderstanding. “Stay away from the timber lot, all of you. There is to be a butchering tomorrow and I don’t want the animals excited. I shall take Mama Ruth to her Prayer Meeting this morning and, Mary, you will keep the children away from the pigs.”
Isaac began to protest but Daniel narrowed his eyes and firmly shook his head. There might, after all, be some evidence of the runaway’s visit to the timber lot.
Mary faced her father. “Simus is skinning a rabbit for us. I must go fetch it as I said I would. For our First Day supper.”
“What you must do is watch the little ones very closely. I shall fetch our supper when I return.” Daniel would not say more, and after he and Ruth left, Mary sat on the steps with Jemima on her lap with thoughts running fast through her head. “A pig is a pig,” she said to her little sister. A pig is a pig. And Simus was her only friend in all of Virginia and her father was always and forever thinking about Ruth and forgetting about her. Her life! Everyone always needing something – help with this, help with that, listening ears, clever hands – but Simus was different. He was helping her. He was training her to do what she had never done before. They had started by using stones in the creek, leaning out over the water’s surface and skimming a flat stone across it to make it skip. When she could skip nine stones out of ten, he had taken her up to the meadow, where he showed her how to aim the stone and when she could hit a target, he had taught her to use the stone to kill a rabbit in a snare. Hit hard and fast, he had told her, showing her the place to make the quickest kill. In her other life – her old life – Mary had loved going to school. But here in Virginia she could stand with her bare feet right in the creek. She could run! That had not been allowed in Brandywine. She thought of the nursery, where she had slept with her brothers and Jemima, where there had been curtains at the window and a rocking chair and a rug. She thought of the picture of a tree that her mother had made with her needle and thread. Mary had started a sampler, but it had never been finished. She had it somewhere, rolled up in her clothes, but it made her feel peculiar to look at it now, with its tiny blood stains and crooked letters and as she sat on the steps and held Jemima, thinking of the nursery and thinking also that Simus must be missing her, she remembered a nursery game. “One two three four,” she said quickly, counting Jemima’s toes before she pulled on the child’s stockings. “Where is Jemima’s littlest pig?”
Jemima loved it when Mary covered her tiny toe and then suddenly revealed it. “Stay here with your brothers,” Mary told her. “I’ll be back in a few long minutes.”
Inside, she took her new dress off the clothing shelf, looked at the sleeping baby, and told the boys not to move an inch. “It is your job to watch baby. I will go see to your pigs.” She told Jemima to sit on the bed until she got back. She took off her old dress and left it lying on the floor and pulled the new dress over her head. The swing of cloth around her ankles gave her confidence and she gave a small skip and then strode away fast, leaving the door ajar and thinking of how the meadow had been a bog and had made her friend’s leg break and how good things can come out of bad like flowers out of mud or nice dresses out of slave-made indigo. There were a few straggly cornflowers left in the grass and she made a little wreath for her hair while she walked. And all the while she was picking and weaving, she was moving toward the timber lot.
Ruth learned about the runaway slave at the Prayer Meeting, where the sermon was about property. “What we own, it is our earthly duty to tend,” the pastor told his little flock. “What we own, we tend, for the Lord has given us everything that is ours.” At one time, Methodists had been fiercely abolitionist. They had broken away from the Episcopal Church with Francis Asbury as their first bishop and in those early years evangelists rode across Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky preaching against the evil of slave owning. But the Southerners had considered the churchmen wrong in this preaching, feeling that to emancipate their slaves would lead to social chaos, and now some churchmen had surrendered to the doctrine of necessity and Pastor Dougherty was among them. “The fowler’s snare is knotted with secrecy,” he told the listening Christians.
Daniel and Ruth were sitting on a bench they had brought in the wagon, Ruth with her feet crossed at the ankles and tucked back so as to hide her split-open boots. The pastor was saying, “And in spite of the words of Paul to the Ephesians – that each slave must obey his master – I am informed by our brother, Jester Fox, that one of his own dark children has rebelled and is living without protection in contradiction of God’s law. This child is in error and must be returned to Mister Fox because we form a community here in Jonesville based on Christian laws.” He looked around solemnly, searching each face, as was his weekly habit, and several of his parishioners answered back in the affirmative. Satisfied, the pastor raised his voice to address the Almighty: “Lord! We ask Thee now from our humble church and humble hearts … we ask Thee to admonish the one who is fled and teach her the example of Je
sus Christ, who gave His life to redeem her in spite of her selfishness and grievous ignorance. Let that her selfishness not lead to an outbreak of the same among other workers,” the pastor continued, striking at the one fear his congregants held in common and launching then into the parable of the prodigal, proving the nature of repentance and the Lord’s readiness to welcome all those who return to His guidance. “It is a sin,” he announced, “to look upon God’s gifts as a debt due to us. I say this with regard to the sinner who harbours another sinner, to that one who is tempted by secrecy, dashing into the fowler’s net when destruction stares him in the face. He will commit a sin that is condemned by the law of the land.” Here, the pastor’s eyes stopped for a moment to regard the closed and wary countenance of Daniel before moving on restlessly to other faces.
Ruth also looked at Daniel, who looked down at his feet. She wondered where he had gone when he’d ridden away under the light of the moon only a few thin hours after Jester Fox had accosted him. She remembered the vehemence on both sides of the argument. She had never seen Daniel truly angry until that moment when the terrible words fell on him just as she came to the window to hear what was being said. But the anger had taken a cowardly form as he spoke through his gritted teeth, trying to be reasonable.
When she and Daniel filed out of the church, people were shaking their heads over the ingratitude of a girl who had been allowed to work in a house among white people.
“She can read and write, what I hear.”
“Won’t help her out hiding in the woods.”
“Should know better.”
“Might as well cut her own throat as hide out there.”
The Purchase Page 11