Bett was not welcome in Ruth’s one-room house, but Mary brought tonics to the door for Joseph, and Ruth called them slave hoodoo and threw them away, saying she would not have such potions near her own baby boy, saying Joseph only needed blood and cream and an extra bit of rabbit stew, if he would but eat. Ruth was absorbed in the antics of her own child and in negotiations with her customers and in feeding the family and making butter.
Daniel was preparing for the spring planting. That March of 1802, Frederick Jones had bought a team of oxen and in April he loaned them to Daniel so he could break up the virgin soil on ten acres of the land bought from Michael Shoffert. Since the murder of Simus, the whole acreage had been neglected. Daniel could not look again at the locust tree, but he kept to a corner of the acreage and did not explore farther. Frederick Jones said that, with oxen, a plow could cut furrows five inches deep, throwing a ribbon of grassy sod on the side and laying another ribbon of soil on top when seed corn had been dropped. He said Benjamin was old enough now, at seven, to walk behind the plow dropping seeds. Then for the next three months it would be a contest between weeds and moles and Daniel as to which would win.
It was the custom to plow a corn field three or four times and Daniel recited Virgil as he fought the unturned ground. Before Jupiter’s time no farmers worked the land …
By June there was a worthy crop of hay for the livestock and the evil spell that had hung over the Shoffert land seemed almost to be lifted as if, after wind and storm, the weather had finally cleared. But long before Daniel had purchased his first six acres, Cherokee had built villages on the riverbanks of southwestern Virginia and Kentucky and farmed the low-lying fields. They had fought the Shawnee, who built their own villages until Napoleon bought their territory. And now a Shawnee from the north named Tecumseh was trying to stir up the tribes. The British were said to be arming his followers, and the people of Jonesville crowded into Silas Murray’s store to read the Weekly Bulletin that came from Petersburg. Rumours were exchanged, and tension began to build.
The two sycamores grew taller. The children grew taller and found shelter in the one sycamore with a hole at its heart. The corn ripened according to its ancient, internal clock, and by late June, when the high stalks cut off the breeze, Daniel was wet with his own heat when he came in for his noon meal. Little John had pushed out of his carapace of linen and spread his wings, doing his best to follow Jemima wherever she went. And as Ruth’s child grew and strengthened, Rebecca’s lastborn withered. It seemed that one thing caused the other, and Daniel could not love little John. He hovered over Joseph, more and more attached. This one especially, Rebecca had said, and Daniel remembered the eyes grown large in her frightened face and he did love Joseph especially and yet he could not make him well.
In the lengthening evenings of fall, when the family and animals had been fed, Daniel sat with the children in front of his fireplace, cracking and eating the meat of walnuts and hickories. This was the hour for reading, when Joseph leaned against him, taking short, laboured breaths. Father Aeneas now was mulling mighty cares this way and that within his breast: whether to settle in the fields of Sicily, forgetful of the fates, or else to try for the Italian coast … . But the firelight was dim, and Daniel, exhausted by his work in the field, sometimes dropped the book and put his head back and closed his eyes, only to think of things he did not want to think of or to see unwanted pictures behind his eyelids. Then he would pinch himself and sit up to read again.
Once, on a cold night, he opened his eyes with a terrible groan and slouched to the door as if he’d been ordered outside. He stayed out in the night for a long time while Ruth worried and the children wondered and when he came back he was rolling a great log of hickory. He told the children that he had walked over the tracks of a bear on his way to the woodpile and had then gone down to the timber lot to check on the pigs. The log was green and so large that Isaac had to help Daniel get it into the fireplace, where it quickly burst into flame. As Benjamin and Jemima came close to watch, a sweet sap began to ooze out of the log and Ruth brought a spoon and the children took turns coating it with the sticky treat. Isaac and Benjamin had been busy that day husking corn and cribbing it and now they made a game out of shaping the sap into balls that could be rubbed into each other’s hair while Jemima fed sap to the doll Simus had made for her, that innocent creature of the blind oak race.
Then real winter descended. The cold was harder that year than anyone in Lee County could remember. “North wind,” muttered Ruth when Joseph developed a cough. Bett made a willow tonic that Mary brought into the house, but Ruth sniffed at the unstoppered gourd and poured its contents into the snow.
“I have given this same tonic to the pastor for his cough.” Mary’s usual quiet voice was hard and sour.
“And you told him you were the maker of it or he would never have swallowed it down.” Ruth loomed in the doorway, blocking it. “You give our neighbours false hope along with falsehoods! Go find Joseph a sourwood tree and bore a hole just over his head. Now then, just listen. If you but put a piece of his hair in that hole he’ll be cured the day he grows past it.”
Mary reported Ruth’s prescription to Daniel. “My little brother is sick and she wants to put his hair in a tree!”
But Daniel only smiled weakly. He had smiled at Ruth too, when he heard her idea. Perhaps there was no connection between nature and reason. It might be that every human success simply required faith. He had begun to believe that Joseph was suffering from the sins of a father who had lost his way. But which sins? He looked at his precious four-year-old in the narrow fireside cot. Rebecca had given her life for this child. He remembered the tiny head in its white linen cap and her pale hand resting so lightly on it. He made himself think of Rebecca as he sat staring at the pattern of the flames in the stone fireplace and he wondered then whether God was a fiction, an understandable human wish. He remembered the words of the widow Fox: What good is praying after what the Lord done me? He had thought her words heresy, but what if the widow was right?
The Catechism asked whether he who has received grace might have ground to fear, and Daniel knew the answer well enough. I must keep under my body and bring it into subjection. But how to do that with a young, ardent wife? Was doctrine more important than experience? He had tossed and turned in the darkness of the loft where he slept with his sons and finally descended the ladder. Now he could not climb that ladder again. He had bedded Ruth Boyd and created a child, convincing himself that there was love in the act. But what if his sin consisted of submitting to lust? Did he love Ruth Boyd?
Unless his sin consisted of something else. He had traded a horse to acquire a human being. From that trade had come two deaths. Daniel sat with his feverish child and thought there wasn’t enough air in the world when he listened to him cough. Only two days before, he had counted the eighty-six dollars he’d managed to save. Most of it came from Ruth’s butter. A little came from the sale of seed corn and fodder. Forty-six dollars. Ten would soon go to the widow for Bett. How could he ever take back his horse?
“Wiley Jones once went to a doctor in Rosehill,” Mary announced the next day, even as she blushed at the mention of this name. She had come to the door with rendered lard from a possum she’d managed to snare and kill.
Daniel replied that doctors were dangerous enough in Pennsylvania, where some of them had actually studied medicine. “Not one of them could save your mother,” he noted, half to himself. “We must pray for guidance, Mary Amelia. In this, I could use your help.”
“Rosehill is not far,” Mary said, although she had never been there. She saw that her father was as much Quaker as he had ever been.
Daniel next said that it was too far to take a sick child in such inclement weather. He said doctors were costly and rarely did anything but put cups and leeches on helpless patients. “Warm weather will clear up his cough,” he insisted. And, indeed, there was a respite in early March just as some of the birds gone for the cold season b
egan to come back. For a week or two, Joseph seemed better. Things were returning to normal with Daniel walking his fields and planning his crops while Ruth spent five dollars to buy a second cow and two mallard ducks.
Then suddenly Joseph worsened and Mary again made her plea. “He is too pale,” she said. “His eyes fill up his entire face.”
Joseph lay on his cot without taking much notice of them and Daniel decided the time had perhaps come to reconsider. “The doctor’s name is Mister Howard,” Mary said as they stood looking down at the sickly boy.
Daniel listened to Joseph cough. He heard his daughter’s advice and the sound of his own guilty heart, which beat on and on without his volition. At last, he told Isaac to bring the wagon round to the door of the house, so that Joseph could be carried out, wrapped in Mary’s quilt.
Daniel had in his pocket the money he’d saved. Next to him, Mary was holding Joseph as if he might break. The child was coughing and Daniel took up the reins and the sun came out from behind a cloud and the landscape brightened. Birds chattered. The coins jingled in Daniel’s pocket and Mulberry’s hooves marked out a rhythm on the road to Rosehill. Clump clump … clump clump … horse for … a boy. Daniel listened. He leaned forward and shivered and then sat up straight. The truth of it drummed in his head. He dropped the reins and put his hands over his ears, but the racket persisted … Horse for … a boy … as Mulberry plodded dutifully along a road surrounded by trees and more trees, their branches squeezing. Mary held Joseph, nuzzling him with her cheek against his. He remembered the long ride with Simus taken behind this horse in this wagon on a day like this. The trees were the same and the sky and the scent of the roadside grass. Here, by this outcrop of rock, he had said, Do you want to ride up here with me? and Mulberry had been plodding … Do you build? Do you want to ride up here? Won’t you come along with me?
At a crossroads ahead, he could see a large rock that resembled a bird of prey. He could hear the words of the auctioneer: The road to my place is marked out by old Eagle Rock when you come ta redeem. Daniel grabbed at the reins, tugging hard to stop Mulberry’s plodding pace.
Joseph opened his eyes.
Mary said, “Why are we stopped?”
Daniel stepped out of the wagon and stood looking up the road that met theirs. Lord, if I make this right … He could not kneel in front of his daughter to bargain with God, so he stood with both hands pressed against his chest. Mulberry blew out her breath, then a great silence fell upon horse and birds and small creatures while they all waited. A red-tailed hawk slowly circled overhead.
When he climbed back in the wagon, he looked at his son in Mary’s arms and turned the horse up the road to his left. “This should not take long.”
The road meandered along, making twists and turns until it petered out to a trace that led into a scabrous valley, bleak and apparently uninhabited. But there behind trees, as if called from a dream, sat the auctioneer’s house, shades drawn down, unwelcoming. A three-legged cat skittered under the porch. As they rocked to a halt, Mary grabbed Daniel’s arm.
Mulberry lifted her muzzle and whinnied.
In the nearby field, there was aggrieved horse response.
Mulberry lurched forward then, yanking the wagon across barren ground until she was stopped by a snaking fence. Beyond it stood Miss Patch, weathered and wound down. Daniel said, “A moment here, please, Mary.”
Mary clung to her brother as her father ran toward the desolate pasture. He did not feel himself climb the fence and he was sure he could not be looking at his much altered, much offended mare. Even so, he crossed the field making sounds in his throat as if answering some injury. “Good lady,” he said to her then, as he always had in the past.
From the other side of the fence came a shrill cry, and Daniel turned as Mary began her useless pilgrimage, carrying Joseph to the auctioneer’s crooked porch. There was the sound of her hand banging on the door and her shouted request for water, for mercy, for help. Then the door opened and she pointed her chin in the direction of the pasture, as if the horse and not the child might explain her need. But the auctioneer looked down at the boy and shook his head, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his sleeve.
Afterward, Daniel watched Miss Patch plod alongside the wagon, lifting her head to smell her release. All around was nature in its exuberance without meaning. He brought his child home and laid him out on the puncheon table he himself had made. He washed him with water and soap – a soft cloth between fingers and toes, behind the ears, inside the nose, around the fragile testicles, as if warmth and cleanliness could ever comfort him again.
Daniel’s bargain with God. He had been four years in Virginia and now there was nothing left to argue against or resist. By evening, he was pushing a spade into its dirt. When the spade hit a stone, the hollow sound seemed to come from his heart. Why enliven the souls of children, only to watch them perish? “I will make no more daughters, or sons,” he said to the Lord. “I curse Thy enterprise, which may not be senseless but the sense of which now eludes me.”
In later years he would wander out to his shed, a building to harbour his two horses – one of them given back freely by the auctioneer – Ruth’s three cows, and a fine group of pigs. And there he would sometimes find Ruth’s little John with his half-brother, Isaac. “Go back to your studies,” he would say to the child whose very existence wounded him. And he would then chide himself for his steel closed heart and wish that Ruth had not come to his house in Brandywine and that she had never stayed. “I planted an apple seed there,” she had told him, pointing at Joseph’s unmarked grave. She had also said, “To bring forth fruit,” but Daniel had told her that his sin lay not in the purchase of a boy for the trade of a horse but in the unholy lust he had once felt for her.
Mary kept to herself, avoiding everyone but Bett. Without daily lessons to attend, Benjamin got up to mischief of one sort or another while Isaac went off to the woods with Frederick’s son, Wiley Jones. Older than Isaac by five years, Wiley was teaching him how to hunt squirrel. The two of them sometimes surprised Ruth with an offering for the iron pot and Isaac, forbidden by Daniel to touch Wiley’s gun, had learned how to skin the animals and preserve the pelts.
Jemima, old enough now to help Ruth in the house, wandered out to the lean-to, where she could be close to Bett’s child, teaching him nursery rhymes and counting games and ignoring Joseph’s cot that sat empty by the fireplace.
Mary spent her time stretched out on the lean-to bed counting again. First Jester Fox came upon us, she told herself. After me walking down to see Simus in my indigo dress. After dropping my old dress on the floor that Simus made. After being told to watch the children because a pig was to be killed. And one of them shall not fall without your Father … . Fathers could not be counted on.
It was Bett’s child who kept Mary breathing as she counted back. She counted as she rocked him in her arms. She counted as she fed him his first corn cake. She counted as she taught him to spell his own name: B-R-Y. She counted as she lay by his side trying to sleep.
One night Bett woke her from a nightmare. “Come out and walk with me,” she said, pulling Mary’s arm. “I’ll show you where the seng roots hide so that when you’re an old woman, you can be out in the woods leaning on your cane, all bent over collecting them, getting wealthy and fat.”
Mary rolled over and smiled in half sleep. “We will be picking them together,” she said, smoothing her hair back and rubbing at her face. For two years and more they had lived as sisters, raising Bett’s child, and she had been comforted by the feel of Bett’s hand on her arm and the sound of her soft, low voice. She no longer walked in the woods and she did not want to leave the lean-to now, in the middle of the night. The crack of a branch, the cry of an animal … But she got off the bed dutifully and reached for her cape as Bett took her hard by the arm and did not let her pull away even as they went past the meadow and down to the dreaded timber lot. It was long past midnight and the mosquitoes were thick and
Bry had to be covered with a blanket as Bett carried him on her back. Swatting at mosquitoes, stepping through the underbrush, Mary unbraided her hair. “The nippers are going after me.” She slapped at her face.
“You should forgive your father, Mary.”
“Will the nippers stop biting me then?”
“Perhaps they will. Your father is grieving, as you are. And just look over there.” Bett was pointing at a dark mess of growth. “This is where they hide. Do you see? It’s easiest in the moonlight, finding the seng roots under their shiny leaves. Remember that when I am no longer with you.”
“Whatever does that mean?”
Bett was digging at a root, using a small knife she carried in her bag. “You can come with me if you don’t marry.”
“Who would I marry in this sorry place? Come where with you?”
“I saw you staring at Wiley Jones.”
“I do not stare. It’s impolite. And you can’t leave me.” Mary felt small and cold.
“And Wiley Jones was staring back at you. He is not what you think.” Bett continued to dig. “When Bry is old enough, I will take him north.”
“You must never try to escape or they will catch you and do what they did to Simus!” How could she live without Bett?
Bett shouldered her bag, saying nothing.
The two girls, ghostly in the dark, climbed up the slope that rose behind the lean-to, a furry hill dense with thickets and a hooting owl.
When Mary tried again to teach her brothers geography or history, Isaac soon lost interest and ran off to be with Wiley Jones while Benjamin became distracted, idly shredding the leaves of Bett’s collected plants. It was Bry who listened attentively. What great bay lies in the northern part of North America? What large river from the east flows into the Mississippi? Isaac and Benjamin didn’t care, but Bry studied Mary’s book as if he could already read them, causing Bett to laugh and say it was against the law to teach a slave. Mountains, where are they? Rivers, where do they rise? Lakes, what are their outlets? Bry listened while Mary protested that it was none of her doing, that Bry was a word thief, and for a few minutes or an hour the air would clear and there would be light enough to lift their spirits, for they were only two girls sharing a tiny space with a child to hold and feed and keep happy and clean and during the nighttime wandering of Bett, Mary lay next to that child, running her fingers over the bones of his dear, sleeping face.
The Purchase Page 15