On the trip home, the road stretched and lengthened. It grew cumbersome, bumpy, and tedious and Ruth felt she was discovering new corners right and left. The wind beating through the trees blew at her straw hat so that she had to tie it under her chin with the purple ribbon and put a hand on the top of her head. Mulberry kept slowing and shying at swirling branches. Leaves blew past, a few drops of rain. Ruth listened to Daniel urge the horse, but they seemed to be moving toward a place they did not want to visit. When a gust of rain came at them, they avoided speaking of it, as they had so far avoided speaking of everything else. “Lord,” Ruth prayed, “let us be no part of this.” The road had narrowed. Out loud she said, “Only a criminal would hide a runaway.”
Daniel muttered, “So it would seem.” It began to rain harder. He flicked his whip. They came to a clearing in the trees and the rain came down on them.
“There was no sign of rain this mornin,” Ruth heard herself say while she counted up Daniel’s mistakes. Onesimus was not the first of them, although he had brought trouble since the day he first came, using up Daniel’s savings and losing them their best horse, breaking his leg, then creating rage in their neighbour. Slaves had no creed, no laws, no families, and should not mix with civilized people. Ruth looked at the man beside her, whose face was wet in spite of his hat and who had used words instead of fists to defend himself. What if Mister Fox killed him and she was left with his five ungrown children? She stared at the side of the road, imagining a grave and Daniel lying in it with his hands across his chest. She would have to send the children off to the poorhouse, just as she had been sent, and she felt a rare tug of compassion for her forgotten mother as she pulled her cape across her face so as not to get wet. “Next slave better be smarter,” she said.
“No more slaves, Ruth Boyd.”
At home, they counted the children and Daniel asked where Mary was. The boys were playing with a wooden ball. The baby was wet and whimpering. Jemima was sitting very still on the bed. “Has she … left … thee … all … alone …?” Daniel’s voice was tighter with every word. Ruth pointed at the dress on the floor and he rushed out into the rain, slipping on the steps and catching himself. There was no sign of Mary in the meadow, so he ran on without stopping, as if he had it in his power to change anything, trees snapping, bare branches whipping at his flesh. He stopped to catch his breath. He ran again. He fell down on jutting stones and stood up, calling out his daughter’s name. Then “Oh my child” because, on the bank of the creek, she was kneeling over the body of Jester Fox, who lay face down, washed by rain. Beside him lay a stone and on his head there was a gash. “Child?”
Mary looked up and shook her head. On her indigo dress was a dark wet stain.
Daniel stood frozen under trees that tattled down to the creek. He saw that Bett was there too, holding Mary’s hand, and wondered where she had come from. What had they done? Whatever it was must be undone because it made no sense, and when Simus appeared and took Jester Fox by the arms and began to pull him away through the mud and leaves, Daniel struggled in his heart and mind. He felt all the love he could make himself feel for his neighbour, as if that would bring him back to his feet. He worked at that love, crouching down. Let him rise, he prayed, and he saw the two girls still huddled together and that, above all, was strange and the dead man was now on his back, blue eyes open, face meaningless, even the small mouth and the curling red beard, sodden, framing it. In that face and body there was nothing left to heal, no inch over which to negotiate, and the forest moved around them when the two girls stood. They walked sleepily, leaning together, and when they reached the body in the leaves, they stepped over it and went on.
Already that day the horse and wagon had been on the road three times, although each trip seemed to have been years apart. The ride to Prayer Meeting, the long ride back home along the lengthening road and through the expanding forest and slanting rain, and now a journey in harder rain with Jester Fox in the back of the wagon sliding aimlessly back and forth. At the frame house the two sons came out at a run while Daniel sat dripping and the rain kept falling. The boys rushed at the wagon as if they knew what it contained and their mother ran out of the house with an apron thrown up around her face. “Dear Jesus, dear Jesus.” She threw herself down and beat at the wet ground with her fists, muddying herself. She yanked at her hair while the sons shouted at a small group of workers. “Get away,” one son yelled, shooing his hand in the air. The other shouted, “Damn you niggers, get over here!” The younger looked to be sixteen or seventeen, and both had their father’s red hair.
Daniel said formally, “I have brought your father, who fell on a rock of our creek.” He sat hunched on the seat of the wagon to forestall any show of nervousness. While the boys opened the back and grabbed at the body, making noises of anger and bitterness, Daniel did not turn. His stomach was clenched, his hands shaking. He believed that Jester Fox looked dishevelled but wet and clean. His red hair, once matted with blood, would be rain-plastered to his head, on the back of which was a deep cut and a shallow concavity.
While Julia Fox beat at the grass, which was wet and plastered like her husband’s hair, Daniel began to climb slowly down as if he should not rock the now empty wagon. He told the widow he was sorry that her husband had fallen. He told her it had happened while he and Ruth were at Prayer Meeting and that there was no reason he knew for his neighbour to be wandering where he didn’t belong when the weather was inclement and the rocks slippery.
Julia shouted, “He come down for water, as is in our rights.”
Daniel said, “Though I saw no bucket,” his voice as kind as he could make it be.
Two little girls came tumbling out of the house and Julia Fox began hurling whatever came to hand, a hammer, a stick. There was the rain with its smell and feel and the flat sound of it striking softened ground. The sons had managed to get the body into the house, where it must be soaking the floors. Daniel climbed back onto the wet seat of the wagon, glancing back at the frame house with a new sense of shame. Often he had wondered whether it was pride or envy that was the worst of his sins, and now, as he looked at those straight boards and windows of glass, he knew it was envy that most assailed him.
“You’ll pay for this!” the widow yelled, shaking her fist at Daniel’s retreat, and he felt a great pity for her.
It came as a surprise, nevertheless, when three boys rode onto his land later that afternoon. Daniel kept his eyes on the rifle one of them was holding. They wore scarves on their faces, but he recognized the red, unruly hair of the two Fox boys and held up his hand. “Now, boys, you are fired up by justified grief,” he said, managing a tone of authority although he was made nervous by the rearing horses and the gun.
The third boy, who was no Fox, called out, “Give over your murderer!” and aimed his rifle at Daniel’s face.
Daniel merely stood.
One of the redheads shouted, “Let him learn what happens when a nigger kills a white man!”
The door opened and Mary came out to stand by her father. She looked at the rifle before she looked at the boy who held it and then took her father’s hand, which was hot and damp. She opened her mouth but she could not put it to language.
Benjamin crawled out from under the porch. “Simus down there,” he said, pointing, and the three angry boys rode off, breaking low branches and pounding the meadow grass flat while the family stood bolted to the porch that was a thin collar on their newmade house.
When the riders came back, Simus was tied behind one of the horses, running, then falling, then sliding face down, dragged by a rope that bound his wrists, dragged and scraped across ground roughened and ridged by horses’ hooves. Daniel rushed down the steps to grab at him, but Simus cried, “You don hep me.”
And Daniel stopped.
Because this was the day for one of the pigs to be killed and hung on a hoist, it stood to reason that the younger children would later confuse the two events. All the anticipation had led to this: by n
ightfall, Simus was hanging where nobody knew how to find him.
How long is the life of a tree and how long is the life of a slave? Here, in the soil just around and covering the roots of the locust, there are drops of blood and a tree does not bleed. Above the ground, a boy is hanging – not by his neck but by his hands, one of which has been torn by a knife – and there is no one around to see him kick or to find him in time to cut him down. The sky is hovering over the thorny branches, as if it would drop around the boy and become his shroud. The sun blinks shut for a minute, but no one notices the tiny night. Simus feels his arms pulled up hard like things unplanted. He thinks that if they stretch an inch or two more, his feet will touch the ground and he will somehow root himself again. He thinks about this new meaning of being free – only to touch the ground. He thinks it might be enough but it will never be guaranteed and he next feels the skin of his back and sides pulled tight by the sag of his weight. Then his bare feet jerk down and up and he feels his whole body jump and spin and he knows that someone is sitting above him up in this tree. “Set me down now! Please!”
“This’ll teach you to bash a white man’s head!”
Simus is thinking about Jesus and those thieves dying by His side. There was three altogether, he says to himself, without making a sound. Then he remembers how Bett told him the story of Osanyin the healer, a god with only one arm, one leg, and one eye after his house fell down on him and how, because he was so injured, he needed the help of humans. She told him about Osanyin while she was mending his leg. And later, she told him again when he had injured his hand … Osanyin is African, she said, as we are. For time uncounted, this story is there in his head. Then he considers Hiram the pig, set to be killed with the sharp end of a pole axe so that all there is left to do is to open the neck and lay it over a trough. A pig, after being killed, is scalded and scraped and hoisted up high enough to be gutted, but a boy is hung first, still alive. A boy is hung by his hands and left to rot. A boy is owned, like the pig, and has no right to decide his own circumstance. His past is unrecorded and his future is nobody’s guess. This is therefore not a murder because it is done to someone who cannot be deprived of what he does not own. Indeed, the boy will hang until his arms are pulled out of their sockets, and still his feet will never know the ground as a plant would define being free. He will hang until animals come to feed on him. He will not be found for three days and nights of looking and by then all of Bett’s herbs and unguents and potions will be useless except those concerned with the laying out of what corpse is left. There will be part of a leg, both shoulders, half a face.
But while he dissolves, he will also retrace.
He knows the ground he walked as a child in every molecule of his two feet, and while they dangle, they keep hold of their sensitivities and send messages up his legs to his brain. While they dangle, they roam the slave encampment by the Tennessee border with its ruts and ridges so heartfelt. They touch the prickly stubble behind old auntie’s cabin, where the ground grows something that opens and shuts, something that prickles and burns, and where the cook pot swings over its arid blur of smoke. He stumbles on acorns and crawls into leaves that are almost clean what with smelling so dry and sharp. He hears old auntie’s shout and he goes on down to the riverbank, which is slick from the washtubs and white-bottomed feet. He lies on his chest and hears his heart pound soft against that ridge where tufts of waxy green emerge in the summer and the water’s taste is thick like meat. He holds his face up over that taste and puts his tongue down to it, thinking of the wild animal he had once seen doing this.
For a while, long or short depending, he spins and then hangs solitary, tongue and feet tasting, first watching the land and trees revolve and finally seeing only a slice of it out of a slice of one eye. The main image, recurring, has been the trunk of the locust tree, which is thicker than one man or even two men and possibly thicker than three. Each time he sees it in his revolution, it seems thinner, two boys, then none and the gorse bushes all along the edge of the field and the fallen-down trees covered by errant, roaming weeds. Spinning, he’s frightened to the point of terror at not knowing what will be next; but hanging, he becomes philosophical. He has been sacrificed. To save Mary.
He dangles and thinks more and more of the tree, the span of its trunk contrasting with the branches that are meagre like his arms. The trunk is strong, but the life of the tree is shallow in the skin, as is the life of a slave. The tree will not read or write and neither will the slave. The tree will feel its past in its roots, which are stuck hard in the ground, but the present is there too, in the dangling feet of a boy, like ants in the blood. When he runs out of water, his insides will shrivel and his brain will shrink, but the ants will keep marching all the way to the gloss of the creek. The boy will not think clearly then, so he must think now of all the times he has been through and of what he can still know. There was the long ride he endured inside his ma’s tight belly, and later a moment when she called out, Son! and he felt swelled up on that. Son! He thinks now of that word and remembers being with his brother in the stiff corn stalks by the well and how they built something of the stalks without cutting them, how they bent and wove those stalks like strong fellows and rested underneath, and he thinks next of a baby inside Bett and her touching the bare skin on her own bruised self and then his. And the baby is the same as he was inside the dark of his mother and maybe it is the thing he calls the dickens, for we are made in His image, and yet he longs now to understand His purpose. Soon I will know, he thinks, and his next thought is for Mary, who instructed him and befriended him and was pleasant in his company, even baring her clean feet and learning from him and that had been the best part of his life.
Dear Taylor Corbett I would come back home if I could for my heart is to sore to bear. I would come if my dear father would allow and leave Virginia where my one friend here was killt crueally. I am so sad. We are taught to forgive but this murder is beyond that rule. How I wish to speak to Caroline as I used to do, but she will never write to me. She also cannot forgive.
Mary Dickinson 21 Novbr 1799
The house Ruth had helped her husband and the dead slave build was more or less finished but for the chimney, and now Daniel was doing his best to follow the measurements for a drawing flue in his worn manual while Ruth handed him one stone after another. Small Ruth, not but sixteen and never the mistress of anything but a butter churn and a china dish. Small Ruth, for whom there were such obstacles as a husband in name only and five unhelpful stepchildren. For Ruth, nothing had changed. But Mary had withdrawn from all of them. She kept company only with the fugitive slave girl, Bett. While she ignored her family and her household duties, Ruth milked the cow, carried the milk to the creek, skimmed it, and later carried it back to the house. She churned, she packaged, she delivered. She harvested what she had earlier planted. She fed Benjamin his choice of edibles and kept the other children alive enough to live another day. When Bett left a tonic at the door for Joseph’s cough, Ruth threw it away because what slave knew a thing about medicine? At the almshouse, she had known someone dead of a fit brought on by a hoodoo remedy, and she knew that Bett had been doctoring Missus Fox when her fourth child was born with a squinty eye. When Bett moved herself up to the lean-to for warmer shelter, Ruth begged Daniel to send her back to the Fox place for good, saying, “She’ll bring trouble on us.”
As if they hadn’t had enough.
Daniel thought of nothing but the dead man lying at the edge of the creek and the boy dragged off later that day. In his mind, Jester Fox lay face down in the mud and Simus hung from the locust tree; it was one picture, always with him. He knew the details of the tree as if he had stood at its foot when Simus was lifted into it, instead of riding and walking and searching. He remembered the deep indentation on the back of his neighbour’s head as if he had put it there. One body on the ground and another in a tree. The image would not be erased. And those words: You don hep me. What did Simus mean? That he was incapabl
e of helping? That he had caused all the hurt the boy was suffering. Or … was it a warning. You. Don’t help me. Because Simus was letting himself be taken? And again the picture of Mary kneeling over Jester Fox with Bett. And again the terrible thorny tree. He was worn down by a lack of sleep, but how could he sleep when he brooded over Joseph’s cough and his unredeemed mare and the unsold land and his corn that might be flattened any minute by rain. How could he sleep when he must try not to think about Jester Fox and the locust tree? At night, he carried Joseph across the planks from one corner of the cabin to another, patting his little back to help him breathe and humming whatever lullaby he could find part of to remember. Oh won’t you come along …
He had caught sight of Miss Patch pulling heavy loads to Elkenah Wynn’s new mill, her ribs showing between the straps of the harness, and he had felt such regret at the sight of her shivering frame that his own chest ached. It seemed to Daniel that everything had come from the trade of this horse for an innocent boy. All of it had come from that. He must go to the auctioneer and find a way to take her back.
But there was a runaway girl in his lean-to who could bring them all to ruin. “One of these days,” Ruth kept saying, “the widow Fox will come up this road to take back what belongs to her and you best be ready for trouble as she’ll put the law to her side.”
The law. What good could come of hiding a girl who was sooner or later to be found anyway? He must speak to his neighbour and argue convincingly on Bett’s behalf. So young, in such a delicate condition, he would say, reminding the widow of God’s example of mercy. He could not keep the girl. Ruth was partly right. There was Mary to consider, who was growing too attached. Ruth had seen the two girls walking hand in hand. “Like friends!” she’d exclaimed. And Mary did not go to the meadow or into the timber lot or down to the creek. The creek and the timber lot and the meadow – all of them – were avoided. At night, when Daniel climbed up the ladder and lay down beside his boys, Mary got up and crossed to the door and ever so quietly lifted the latch. Sometimes Daniel climbed down the ladder then and stood at the window and watched the dim glow of Mary’s lantern pass through the milk gap and into the night. He stood on the cold floor he had built by placing one board next to another across the beams like a bridge.
The Purchase Page 12