The new century arrived, as if the world might really change and the dead reappear. 1800. The chimney was at last complete. The sky cleared. The creek began its trickle over thinning ice. Bears woke and wandered hungrily. Birds flew from one place to another, searching for places to nest. Ruth went down to the creek with the cream she had brought from her customers, passing the lean-to where Bett now lived. She no longer asked when Bett would be leaving. She had given that up the day Daniel went to the widow with her dearly saved cash, spending it for a girl who was only another mouth to feed. Bett did not milk the cow or wrap butter in packets or work the earth. She thought she was someone special, and now Mary kept her company, passing by Ruth as if she did not exist. Once Ruth had seen the girls holding hands and yelled out, “Which one of you is blind?”
One day in late April, Bett led Mary to the door of the lean-to and said, “This is my time.”
Time?
At the sound of the latch being set – a scraping of metal on wood – Mary thought of the stone at the door of Christ’s tomb. She put her ear to the splintery wood and heard Bett at her vegetal work in the dark, lighting a fire and pouring water into her iron pot, and she remembered her mother screaming behind a different door in Brandywine, after which nothing was ever the same: no more reading in front of the fireplace with its big cooking pot, no more skipping to the Academy, where Taylor Corbett sat on a bench with Isaac and she sat with his sister, Caroline. Could she have guessed that her mother would never again brush her straight hair, remarking that it must have come from her father’s side of the family? She heard Bett whimper and thought of the tomb and of Jesus, and of Simus, who had died for her, and it was all bound together, for this was his child.
It was a morning of hush, of no singing birds, of no children’s cries. Bett thought of the Fox place, where there was always the thundering of boots and slamming of doors and the two little girls laughing and shouting. Perhaps they had thought it fitting that she move out of the nursery to a hut when her grandmother died. Perhaps what happened to Bett was of no interest to those little girls as long as she could tend to their every need. Bett could, after all, take herself out a pitcher of water to clean her hands. She could do her business behind a bush, as she would not notice such inconvenience any more than a dog would notice it. While Bett thought of these things and the first deep contractions hit, a new anger bloomed in her. It was directed at Missus Fox, who had not wanted to see that Bett was visited in that hut, a fact she would never admit. She did not blame the workers who were kept down by the field in their quarters. They had no way of protecting her. Once they crawled into their cabins at night, they ate their mush and went to sleep, as was their right. Their lives were harder than hers, or so they must have thought, but she had once lived in a house at that Tidewater place, had once spoken with trust to her mistress there, had once taken Saturday baths in the kitchen and the next morning listened to her grandmother speak of the African gods while the white family went to church. Now Bett spread her red cloth on the dirt floor and walked round and round it to measure the circumference of pain that was to come. What had Onesimus suffered on the locust tree? What would she suffer compared to it? She remembered her grandmother’s husky voice calling on Nana Buruku, who managed birth and death. She remembered that at the rising and setting of the sun, the living and the dead exchange day and night, so she squatted and crossed her arms to call her grandmother back, but the light, slanting between logs, the warm air, and the smell of the ground brought back instead the way she had previously lived behind her master’s house. She remembered the times Rafe Fox had come to her hut and pissed against it while she lay under his father. She remembered the weight of that man and the smell of the piss and the jabbing pain and how Eb also cornered her and grabbed her although not while her grandmother lived. She sipped very slowly at the concoction she’d brewed – lobelia, squaw vine – and felt better until it was worse and then it became unbearable. Had not her mother and her grandmother endured this? Had not every woman before her endured it including the first mother, who was some colour or no colour, some hue, some belonger to some race, who was the mother of all those mothers who came after? And what crime had those mothers committed except by relationship? She pulled her medicine bag close, took out the chalk she kept hidden there, and crawled onto her knees to draw a white cross on the red cloth, dividing the world of the dead from the living. Between the astonishing vise-squeeze of contractions, she squatted low and made herself drink, made herself breathe, made herself think of the creature inside her, troubled in its ground, turning and bursting, tearing her flesh. She talked to herself, Ancient Father, Sovereign one, Dark stone coming down, but remembered Mary’s raised hand and again, not hearing herself, begged the seed to assume its form, drinking more of the tea her grandmother had taught her to make.
That old woman had been brought over in a ship, curled up, nearly starved, surely raped. That old woman had landed in Cuba before coming to Charleston on another ship and, having come to an enlightened Virginia house, taught herself the words in the cookery book so she could sleep indoors, civilized. That old woman was known as Molasses and what was her name in fact? Bett didn’t know; Bett was never told. Bett knew only her grandmother’s hands and arms, voice and face. Healer. Known far and wide. Who am I, then? Only the grandspawn of a woman called Molasses. She thought of the other one she had loved, Onesimus, who had been more alone than even she had been and who would, from this day, be her child’s father since she willed it that way.
When there was no response to her fist pounding on the door, Mary broke through the feeble lock and found Bett lying on the bloodied cloth, still and most surely dead. Out of her body something like a fleshy string connected her to an infant who lay quiet between her legs. Mary ran fast, yelling for Ruth, who was in the garden, picking early peas. “Bett’s got a baby and she’s not moving a bit!”
“Well, nothing is born without suffering,” Ruth said coldly.
“What would you know about suffering?” Mary’s indignation was hot as flame as she tugged at the girl who was her stepmother, at least in name.
Ruth put down her hoe and entered the lean-to fearfully. The newborn was down on the floor, smudged with blood, and the sight made her almost faint. There was blood leaking out of the girl and it made a dark, sticky smell and Ruth closed her eyes and held her breath. She had never touched a person in such a place, but she pushed at Bett’s stomach flesh, for she had listened in the kitchen during the long hours of Joseph’s birth and knew this birthing was unfinished. Bett’s eyelids fluttered and after some minutes a mass slipped out of her and still there was more to be done. “Find a knife.”
“Ruth, no!”
“For the cord.”
When the afterbirth hung from her hands, Ruth pushed it at Mary with a noise of disgust. “Take that filth outside and bury it deep, less you want a wolf to eat it and make the man-baby grow up wild.”
The birth of Bett’s son caused no stir in the log house, for she did not visit and the rare cries the family heard from the lean-to were quickly hushed. The child was given the name Bry, and Mary was nurse to both mother and child.
One evening in July, as his children were preparing for sleep, Daniel saw that Mary was sitting with Jemima, sewing a little dress for the baby and telling her sister how he was learning to smile and would soon turn over. Ruth was frowning down at her own handwork and neither girl was speaking to her. Daniel got up from his bench, pulled a coil of hemp cording from his trunk, and fastened it to the corner posts of the bed where Mary and Ruth and Jemima slept. While he worked at this, Mary stared at him and when Daniel went to the corner, to the pile of blankets and quilts, and began to hang them one by one on the line, she said, “But where am I to sleep?” She had stopped her work.
There was the grey blanket being hung. It had been carded and spun and woven in one piece by Grandmother Grube. There was the brown blanket woven by Grandmother Dickinson and the Tree of Life quilt
that her mother had made, second best to the one her father had given to the naked Cherokee at the Mennonites’ creek. There was a worsted quilt brought from England on the ship with her grandparents in the year 1725. Each of these was a precious part of Mary and now they made a wall meant to warn her away from her bed! It was all too clear what her father was doing. She shot a hard look at him, willing him to change his mind, but he had lined up the blankets and quilts without cracks between them and was sitting again by the fire, looking down at his hands, as if even he was surprised by what they had accomplished. “What bed am I to occupy?” Mary asked again too loudly. When her father pointed at the ladder, she stood up fast, making a noise of it, and rushed to the line he had hung with the fabric of her life and pulled down her mother’s second best quilt and ran out the door with it.
At the sound of its slam, Ruth’s skin reddened as if she’d been struck. There had been a year or more, early in her sterile marriage, when she had imagined the thing that was about to take place. What would her husband say to her? She had imagined tender kisses and wondered what they would be like. No one had ever kissed her except maybe her mam when she was a child and now she glanced around the room noting the order she had brought to it, as if for reassurance. This place. Where she lived. When the others read in the evenings, she found work to do with her hands, never mentioning her inability to decipher written words, but using the time to make patterns that helped her remember her customers’ orders. When someone ordered more than the usual amount of butter, she had no way to remember except by changing the location of an object. The wooden spoon, which belonged on a shelf by the fireplace, put her in mind of Missus Craig and it was relocated if that lady desired an extra square or two. The silver spoon was for Missus Dougherty, and the saltcellar was for Missus Jones, who changed her mind so frequently that Ruth could not remember where the saltcellar originally belonged. She let her eyes rest on these things in order to restore her confidence, bunching the shirt she had been mending into a mess of cloth and looking down at her worn brown linsey, which was damp from her heat. The door was shut against mosquitoes and the fire was warm from the cooking and Ruth fanned herself and tried to still the rocketing in her heart.
Then Daniel sent Jemima to sleep with the boys in the loft and sat holding Joseph, staring at Ruth, who stared at the floor. Did she not understand? He began to feel angry. Had he not waited? Had it not been two years and more since she had come to them and in that time hadn’t they grown used to each other as tenders of children and animals and fields? The misery of dear Rebecca’s death. The awful journey, the long, homeless weeks. Building the house with Simus. And dear Joseph, who barely walked and wouldn’t speak and now Daniel brushed at the child’s sandy hair and wondered why he loved him more than all the rest. He gathered the child to him and thought of Ruth’s strange lack of curiosity. He thought of Jester Fox lying in the mud, with Mary kneeling over him, although he tried not to stay with that thought for long. Tonight his daughter had run into the dark and yet here was another girl in his house, eating, sleeping, breathing her essence in and out so that it surrounded him. And was she not grown? Did his eyes deceive him? She was surely comfortable in her womanly hips and rounded bosom, even under the corset she had ordered from Silas Murray, although what did she know of marriage? Daniel made himself consider Ruth’s innocence. If he wondered about her feelings for him, she made them clear when she stood up and went to the ladder and climbed it, putting her arms around Jemima and carrying her back down to the bed. “Did you know that Satan,” she was telling the child, “was the best singer in heaven?” Quickly, she stretched out next to Jemima, taking her boots off, but leaving her dress buttoned and her hair up in pins.
Daniel sighed and carried Joseph up the ladder to the loft and told the older boys to lie quiet and say their prayers so that only the Lord could hear. “I shall sleep below with Mama Ruth.”
The boys looked surprised, knowing little or nothing about the ways of husbands. “What if he makes wee on our bedding, Pap?”
“He has been to the privy. Do not jostle him. Now, goodnight.” Daniel lifted the burning candle and carried it backward down the ladder, blowing it out when he touched the floor. There was another candle on a nightstand next to Ruth, who was lying with an arm around Jemima. The candle’s flame cast its eerie flickering over his wife’s young face and he saw that her eyes were shut, that her forehead was creased, and he knelt down beside her, his pulse beating fast in his throat. Leaning close, he sniffed at his wife’s armpit. Then he began to pull the pins out of her hair where they were available to his long fingers, placing them one by one in a small dish that sat empty on the stand next to the burning candle. It was painted with a picture of a ship on blue water and it was precious to Ruth, a thing she had from her lost family or the almshouse, for there had been nothing in between. He had put the painted dish on the nightstand as a sign of his regard and now he moved Ruth’s head to one side and pulled more pins from her hair and when there were loosened braids on the pillow, he arranged them around her head and stared down at her, inserting a finger between her collar and throat, feeling her tremble like the candle flame.
“What doin there, Pappy?” Jemima opened her eyes.
Daniel got off his knees, feeling the stiffness in them, and sat beside Ruth on the bed. “Sleep, child. Listen to the owl in the woods.” He removed his boots, his pants. He had forgotten to bring down his nightshirt, so he stretched himself out carefully. “By night the light stubbles,” he whispered, putting his mouth close to Ruth’s ear. “By night the wife runs her ringing comb through the web.…” He could think of nothing else to say to her.
Only once had Daniel gone back to visit the locust tree after he had found what was left of Simus and carried the pieces to Bett for burial. He had gone back on a warm spring day after Bett’s child was born, hoping the sight of dripping flowers would erase the sight that haunted him and bring back the elation he’d felt on first encountering the expanse of land he had bought with his last two warrants. He remembered the smell of the unplowed meadowland and the pond he had found by accident and the way he had jumped off his horse and walked out of his clothes and entered water that was hard on his naked skin. He remembered opening his eyes under the water’s surface to see what living things might be bathing with him and he had seen nothing in the murkiness, but something large and fleshy brushed against his thigh and he had yelped, lifting his feet high with each step until he was back on shore again. He remembered that he had first seen the huge locust tree on that happy day.
Now he braced himself. When he could see the great tree in the distance, he dismounted and put his right hand on the neck of his horse and walked along like that, drawing some comfort from the animal’s warmth while remembering the sight of Simus hanging among the dark, dangling pods that John the Baptist had fed on during his long ago stay in the wilderness. Simus had had no shelter of leaves, for the locust drops them in late summer and stays bare of them for half the year. His death was therefore more terrible, given no shroud of green, and mocked by the rattling pods that were said to be sweet. And those long thorns growing out of the furrowed trunk must have pierced the boy’s flesh as he hung and twirled. Daniel stood with his hand on his horse and took many deep breaths.
What grieved him was not the white perfumed flowers hanging on bare branches as if they’d been casually tossed but the small, innocent articles of faith so lovingly placed around the base of the tree. He crept a little closer, focusing on a thimble that lay rusting and upended. Who might have placed it there like a tiny urn? And the length of ribbon, which had once held colours in its grain, and the wooden button? Had they been left by other men’s slaves? Each offering had been chosen and sacrificed, like the boy himself. He thought of John, the locust eater, who had said, Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it bears much fruit, and he did not understand the words anymore now than he ever had but he drew out his handkerchi
ef and bent to put it by the rusty thimble.
After such a death, what hope was there for his neighbours, who had ignored it, or for the ones who had enacted it, or for the man who had bought a boy and brought him to this end?
PART 2
Ruth called her child John, for the Baptist, and fed him a mixture of blood and cream until she could no longer lift him. Had anyone seen a child smile in its second month or laugh in its third? Had any baby such muscled legs, such a firm grip, such unswerving eyes? How was anyone to dispute her claims? Little John was swaddled so tightly that, according to Missus Dougherty, he looked more papoose than Christian. “It be the way to raise them straight,” Ruth asserted, for she had seen it at the almshouse, where they hung the orphans on hooks in their swaddling clothes to straighten their spines.
Daniel’s relations with Ruth had hardly changed. He was quiet with her, even taciturn except in the dark of night, when he was undone by her heat next to him. Together they had made a child who did not resemble his others in the least. John was dark-haired, robust, and pink-skinned from the Virginia air he breathed, although that breathing seemed to steal the air from Joseph. “This one, especially,” Rebecca had said on her deathbed, instructing Daniel to care for her fragile newborn above all the rest. But Joseph’s smile was vanishing; his laugh was a disappearing note. He lay on his cot by the fire, watching people come and go without joy or complaint, as if he had given up the last tiny shred of will. Seeing the pale face, the large eyes, Daniel remembered a moment at the slave auction when he had thought of this child for no reason. He had looked up at a boy on the auctioneer’s stage and thought of small Joseph, even then wondering why his own child’s face had appeared to him. Had it been a warning?
The Purchase Page 14