The Purchase

by Linda Spalding

  “Mister Craig is suffering a complaint,” Missus Dougherty whispered to Ruth after Prayer Meeting one Sunday, “and asks would you bring along Mary when you come for their cream. I gave him a bit of her tonic and he seemed to benefit …” Missus Dougherty had taken Mary’s tonic for an irritation of the bladder. She had given Mary a small coin in return, along with her thanks. “The Quaker folk have something special about them,” she said, half to herself, adding that the efficacy of Mary’s tonic might have had something to do with the holy water of the creek, which Mary said was an ingredient.

  “Mary is no doctor,” Ruth retorted, feeling diminished in her role with the butter churn, “and these days she does not go out.”

  Missus Dougherty said Mary was of course grieving for her brother, which was understandable, but it had gone on long enough and would be mended by usefulness.

  But Mary’s grieving looked more like blaming to Ruth. Blaming Daniel for Joseph’s death, although Joseph had seemed ready to die from the very day Ruth had come to the house in Brandywine, where he barely took the breast his mother offered and then spit up what he swallowed. Ruth thought once more of the weaklings at the almshouse. It was Mary who had begged her father to take the sick child out on a cold March morning to see a medical man when poor Joseph should have been left in his cot. What good in the world are cups and leeches to a sickly child? Now it was Daniel who grieved and Daniel who wept when he thought no one could hear. Ruth had little John balanced on her hip and when she pinched his leg, he let out a healthy wail. Well, then. Her boy was strong and fit. Ruth tugged at her hat and put a protective arm around little John as she nodded to Missus Dougherty and decided that one Dickinson in the healing business was certainly enough.

  As the wagon drew up, she pushed John up over the wheel, which was warm to the touch from an hour in the sun – an hour of listening to the pastor preach about land stolen from the Red Indian, only he said it wasn’t stolen because they had never made any claim to it. The Jonesville men should be arming themselves, the pastor had warned.

  The sky was noisy with cranes and geese. Their squawking and honking made a racket overhead, and the roadside trees tossed as if all those wings above had raised a wind. It was going to be a hard winter according to Mister Jones, who made his forecast based on the thickness of his sheep’s grey wool. Ruth looked at the brittle landscape and tried to forget about Mary and her potions, but Daniel was clearing his throat, readying himself for an announcement. “Ida Dougherty wants to see our Mary out doctoring,” he announced and scratched at the beard he was growing. “I wonder if she hopes to heal Mary or Hiram Craig.”

  “So Missus Dougherty would have Mary sitting by a man’s bed?” To show her disapproval, Ruth narrowed her mouth and gave her full attention to a prairie chicken that had fluttered up from the field, its feathers the same muted colour as the grass. “But the pastor says times are dangerous and girls should stay home.”

  “Mary is eighteen. She needs occupation.” Daniel snapped the reins, finding Ruth’s admiration for the pastor more irritating than usual today, when the tedious sermon had been used to frighten his neighbours into taking up arms. The president had quietly paid some millions of dollars to Bonaparte, thereby purchasing half of North America and aiding the French in their war against the British. Americans would be caught in the middle. It was no time for a minister of the cloth to be pugilant. Daniel had spent the hour of that unreasoning sermon thinking about Isaac, who, at fourteen, was spending far too much time with Wiley Jones. With such a one as inspiration, Isaac might want to join any available fight. Occupation. It was the only answer for his children. Now, during a long, meditative ride home, a vision came to him – the vision of a paddlewheel turning in Sawmill Creek.

  At home, he unhitched the horses and went straight to the lean-to, where Mary kept her sister and brothers every First Day until noon. It was an arrangement that suited Daniel well, connecting the children to the faith of their ancestors, since Mary led them in the practice of meditation, and allowing Daniel to sit beside his wife at the Methodist Prayer Meeting. He tapped on the door and she opened it without greeting, for she had been cold to him since the day of Joseph’s death. Months ago, that had been, and he refused to broach the subject. “Tomorrow, you are to take up the service of healing, Mary Amelia,” he said gravely after sending the other children home and bringing her outside, away from the ears of Bett. Even to himself he sounded like a Quaker Elder. “It is time to take up your cross. Hiram Craig suffers a bladder complaint,” he explained, standing under the midday sun in his Quaker hat and adjusting his shoulders, which were stiff. Then, although his hand went to his heart, he walked away to eat his Sunday dinner without further comment.

  Mary felt the slight temptation of pride. And ambition. In the lean-to, Bett was making mush to be soaked in milk and it would be eaten by Mary on the edge of the bed with Bett at a squat before her son, who sat on the ground with his legs out in front of him. In the lean-to, there were no plates, no towels for the wiping of hands or drying of lips. Every spoonful of mush would be eaten and any leftover milk would be put to curdle for another day. In the log house, they would eat venison shot by Wiley Jones. They would eat with knives and plates. Mary looked around at her surroundings. “I need a tonic for Mister Craig’s bladder,” she said casually. And when Bett handed her a bowl and she put it between her knees to feel its heat through the layers of fabric, she added, “I must know the recipe. He may ask.”

  Bett looked at Mary in an odd way. “It is not possible to tell recipes,” she said. “I learn from the plants and each one has its provenance. Such knowledge is my bridge.”

  “Bridge?” Mary decided to watch Bett prepare the tonic, noting the place on the wall where the plant was hung and counting the black walnut husks that Bett ground and whatever else she added to the iron pot. “Bridge to what?” She was eighteen years old and living in a shack without her own bed, and tomorrow when her father returned from his morning ride around the fields, she would take Mulberry into town and cure Mister Craig with Bett’s tonic. She would be glad to do it. She even looked forward to it, although she could not admit it to Bett, who knew cures for sore throats and sore stomachs and sore muscles and loose bowels and loose teeth and everything else that could happen to a body in this world. Bett had made tonics for slaves and now she went on making them and if Mary sometimes gave them to people in Jonesville and they sometimes gave her a coin in payment, what was the harm in that?

  Bett said, “My future. In the north. Bridge to that.” She glanced at the wall where the hanging plants were too inconclusive to be deciphered by Mary’s unknowing eyes. The tick-weed she needed for Mister Craig had been picked in July and dried in the shade. Its oil was highly poisonous, but the plant had benevolent uses. Hanging next to it was a rhubarb root to be mixed with green hellebore but first to be soaked or ground or singed depending on the need of the patient. In the daytime, enough light filtered into the lean-to that Bett could see to poke stalks through stems and hang her plants up to dry. By nightfall she could go outside and collect more plants to boil or dry, safe from the fear of the Fox boys. She could straighten her back and look up through branches that had lost their leaves. She could smell the cures that lived in the dirt, emitting more of themselves in the dark. She knew which vine corrected slow childbirth and which root relieved asthma. She saw that Mary was watching … “Ragwort, which is taken for rheumatic pains, is also used for eye inflammation, although of course these uses require different parts of the plant,” she said coyly and smiled to herself. “Where sarsaparilla is concerned, it combines well with yellow dock and dandelion and red clover, but for certain conditions it must only be mixed with burdock … oh, and it is the dark roots that are best. Then there is slippery elm, whose roots are used for births while the leaves are used on gunshot wounds …” Bett peered at her hands, as if they held mysteries she could not name. “Tomorrow I will take a tonic to Mister Craig.”

  Mary sa
id, “No one takes medicine from a slave, Bett. And there are the Fox boys to consider. I will manage Mister Craig.”

  Daniel, who spoke Latin and loved his Virgil, had asked Frederick Jones about finding a teacher for the children of Jonesville – but the neighbour saw no merit in such a plan. He depended on his son’s prowess in bringing home game and had not wasted time on his schooling. “If your boys need occupation, better to build the mill you have mentioned before,” Frederick Jones advised, and Daniel remembered the vision he had entertained on his ride home from Prayer Meeting. Perhaps occupation would have to take the place of Virgil for the time being.

  When he passed Michael Shoffert driving a mule cart heaped with hay later that week, he yelled out to him, “Say there, neighbour, I need a man to build a mill. Do you know of one such?” Surprised by his own outburst, he even doffed his hat.

  Shoffert pulled his mule to a halt and studied the man who had bought his hundred acres and never put it to any use but to plant some hay in one corner. He said, “I have me a nigger I was thinking to sell. Or I could hire him out at two bits a week. He built Mister Wynn a good mill as a matter of fact and he could plow up your unused fields.” He rubbed his chin. “I had it in mind to sell his woman too, but they would surely be grateful to stay together, having two little ones to raise. Although they do not attach themselves as we do,” he admitted.

  Daniel agreed to hire the couple for the time it would take to build the mill and see it into operation, and the next day Shoffert sent over a man wearing deerskin pants, a leather vest, and a bright scarf around a neck that was surely as thick as another man’s thigh. The man called himself Floyd, and Daniel took him to the rapids, which Floyd said had good rise but no access by road. It was therefore no place for a mill, he said glumly, and Daniel let himself study the big man’s face, taking note of the depths of Floyd’s eyes and the light reflected there. Daniel had grown up around millers, some of them said to be thieves for taking a portion of the product, and he had never wanted to join the trade. A miller was meant to provide a service and make no profit. Now he suggested to Floyd that they build a mill downstream, closer to the road, and he wrote to his father that night, requesting a bed stone and a runner stone, glad to give his father proof that he was prospering. Floyd built a shed first, for the animals, and brought his woman and sons to sleep there with him and to help Ruth with the churning and gardening.

  Then, for many days following, Daniel and his sons watched Shoffert’s slave fell an oak tree to use as the foundation of a dam, then pack brush and leaves and dirt against it so the land was harried and drowned, one thing consuming another. The boys helped by dragging a bushy limb to the site and leaving it to be lifted by Floyd, who seemed stronger than anyone in the world. They watched him fell a great white oak for the wheel, laughing at them for their fear of the axe, even brandishing it over their heads as if it weighed nothing. But Isaac became restless even then. The process of making a wheel seemed tedious to him and he thought of Wiley Jones, who had begun to visit the town, going to the door of Silas Murray’s store, where people gathered to gossip, or the blacksmith’s shop, where the bellows could be heard from the street and where boys and men stopped to lean against a wall and discuss the idea of a war. Wiley said the blacksmith would beat at a piece of iron, stopping every few minutes to examine his handiwork. “Plowshares into swords,” he had commented once, holding up a bayonet.

  Wiley was a stout boy of medium height with a shock of yellow hair. He had grown up in the fields around his parents’ house, coming back to their heavily accented English at the table and escaping again when meals were done. He was proud of his father but embarrassed by him, and he often made his escapes with the willing Isaac, who was greatly impressed when a squirrel was killed by one shot and even more so when Wiley brought down a bird in flight. Isaac was always thinking about one thing or another, and chattering on about the strangeness of the universe. Sometimes Wiley let him hold the rifle. It had been made by a gunsmith in Philadelphia and purchased by his father when he got off the ship from Hamburg. Wiley said the rifle’s aim was perfect, although Isaac found the gun heavy and daunting when he lifted it, and once when Wiley said he could pull the brass trigger, which was soft to the touch, Isaac forgot his father’s ruling and closed one eye and peered out of the other at a tree that was ready enough to receive injury. He aimed and fired, but the report threw him back and Wiley said his future wife and children were sure to die by starvation.

  While Isaac was secretly learning the skills of manhood from Wiley Jones, Benjamin stood alone near the rushing creek watching Floyd construct the mill. He had found a knife on the side of the road with a handle of inlaid ivory, and as the slave dug a pit and put a gate at each end, Benjamin whittled at sticks, making them pointed like the bayonet Wiley Jones had seen at the blacksmith’s forge.

  Then winter came and snow lay over the wheel and work was suspended for three long months. Ice formed on the cogs of the tailrace and Benjamin retired to the log house to help Ruth keep track of orders while Isaac went with Wiley to set traps and collect pelts. By now, only Daniel had a coat, and it was threadbare. The children had outgrown or outworn their Pennsylvania clothes and Ruth had come to Virginia with only a thin cape. At milking time, she went to the cow shed wrapped in a blanket, pleased when little John clung to her as she tried to leave. She always bent down and kissed him then, for no one had ever needed her but Benjamin.

  There was talk that winter of a wolf pack, hungry and on the move. Frederick Jones had lost three sheep and Daniel worried about his pigs. “They suck out the blood,” Isaac reported excitedly, “and leave the flesh. Wiley is going to shoot me one for a coat.”

  Jemima reported that Bry had found a possum frozen to a tree.

  “Not likely,” said Isaac, who liked to show off the education he had acquired. “It was only pretending to sleep.”

  Benjamin laughed at the innocence of a sister who would believe such a thing as a possum stuck to a tree. The two brothers were huddled together at the smokey fireplace with their feet in worn boots extended toward the heat, with Joseph’s cot sitting empty nearby. If they thought about their brother, who had coughed and wheezed on such nights as this, it was with a guilty sense of unbrotherly relief. Tonight he would have required constant attention as it was bitterly cold and the fire was bigger and smokier than usual. Daniel cast a long look at the cot and remarked that the lean-to must be even colder than the log house and that Mary should be invited to join them in the house.

  Ruth made no comment when he rose from his bench and opened the door. As a blast of cold blew over them, she hunched over little John, who was on her lap, thinking Mary would be too proud to come. Too proud and too full of blame. She had set herself against her father for too long now to forgive him. But a few minutes later, Daniel returned, leading Mary by the hand. He pulled one of the blankets off the line and wrapped it around her, then put his arms around the blanket, pressing her close. Jemima jumped up to hug Mary’s cold legs. And then Bett and Bry came stumbling in, having come through a wall of snow without wraps although Ruth had never invited the runaway or her boy into the house. After all, Missus Fox had a crooked-eyed girl born under Bett’s care and there was that unlikely birth, with Bett lying on the ground and her blood leaking out … Ruth remembered the feel of the flesh she had touched. And now the little boy birthed that day was making his way to Jemima’s side, wearing boots that had once belonged to Benjamin. Jemima had even found a place for him by the fire, putting her doll of the oak race into his small, dark hands.

  In the days that followed, Bett made her many remedies, and when the weather allowed, Mary brought them to the settlers who were taken sick in the cold, claiming them as her own. She collected modest fees from her customers and put the money aside with the thought of helping her father with his annual ten-dollar payment to the widow. She visited Mister Craig and Missus Emory and a boy named Rob, who was apprenticed to the blacksmith and was suffering a f
lux. She visited Silas Murray, who put the remedies into vials and set them on his counter – one for Cough and Sore Throat, another for any Itch or Eruption of the Skin, one for Fever of the Joints, and one for Digestive Complaints and Unruly Bowels. People were glad to find remedies that did not require them to visit Doctor Howard, who was costly, and as Mary began to have followers who wanted consultations, she began to think she would be a midwife. She would learn Bett’s recipes. She would learn to fix a broken limb.

  Daniel decided that in the spring, when the mill had walls and a roof, Ruth’s butter and Mary’s medicines would be sold there. He might sell cider, as well, and other supplies for travellers who stopped to grind grain. Grind once, sift once, he told Isaac, who was soon to find occupation at the mill. But Isaac’s thoughts wandered to the woods, where there were things to hunt, and to the blacksmith’s, where there were things to hear. He wanted to hunt not as his sister did with her snares and traps but with a gun. He wanted to hear from other boys and men about politics. He was fifteen that winter and while he cribbed the corn and cut firewood and mucked out the shed, he dreamed of grooves and bores and the buck he would shoot, as Wiley had done the winter before, with a single bullet.