By May, when the millstones arrived by oxcart, only Benjamin was there to watch the paddlewheel pull the river up and around and down again and in its turning make the millstones grind. Isaac had gone into town with Wiley Jones but Benjamin, with his mother’s fair hair and pale skin, with her patience and her practical mind, watched every move of Shoffert’s slave as he piled stone upon stone, building a room that would serve as a stopping place for travellers. He watched Floyd build the walls of this millhouse and then build a second floor so that when he carried the ground meal up a ladder he could spread it out with a rake to cool. Benjamin did not converse with Floyd but stood off to one side under a newly greened oak and one day he looked up to see Bry dressed out in feathers balanced on a branch. The boy, who had never seen a black man before, was studying the slave the way a crow will study a raven.
As the dam began to hold and a little reservoir of water collected behind it, Bry came back every day. Wearing a torn cambric shirt decorated with feathers and bits of cloth, he resembled an exotic bird in a forest of leaves as he climbed up to study the man with his similar skin. His understanding of the world came from his two mothers and from seven-year-old Jemima. He had spent no time around men. Now he watched the slave’s movements and listened to his patterns of speech. When the big man laughed, Bry practised making the sound in his own small throat. When Floyd chopped, Bry watched his arms and hands. Floyd could stand in the rushing water as it rose around him until it reached the red scarf tied at his throat. Then, without blinking, he lifted his feet and lay on his back on top of the water like a dead fish, laughing, looking up, pointing a finger straight at the clouds.
When Bett and Mary came to the mill to grind corn, Bry saw that they were unequal in the eyes of the man he admired. He saw a difference between the two mothers and he saw that it widened or narrowed depending on who was speaking to them. He saw that Mary was more tolerant when he stole vegetables from Ruth’s garden. When Bett caught him at it, she stamped her foot and clapped her hands in his face. By the time the seedling on Joseph’s grave had grown from the seed Ruth had planted into a little tree, he had used the first fruits for his target practice, smiling when questioned by Mary and declaring that apples were like fingernails and would quickly grow back. She had laughed and patted him approvingly and in such ways as this, he found a confidence that was unusual in the son of a slave.
Raising her child, Bett thought of the steadiness she had known in that kitchen where her grandmother had cooked and lived, sleeping behind the chimney with the grandchild left to her when her daughter was sold. She thought of her grandmother’s habits, her stories and instructions. Collect bur-duck seeds in late summer and store them dry. Take the roots in the fall of the first growing year. Plant when the moon is full. Dry pennyroyal in the shade; it promotes birthing early or late. Look for squaw vine near evergreen stumps. Pick a stem, never cut.
As her boy got older, she told him about this great-grandmother, taking him into the woods at night so he would learn to move quietly in the dark. She taught him to walk without making footprints and to read the direction from the moss on certain trees. She told him that one day they would walk away from this place and that knowledge would then be required of him. “There will come a time when you will have to think for yourself or for both of us.” Bett was a slave, but her child had no concept of any such thing and she was glad of that particular ignorance in him. Sometimes she told him stories of the mpemba, the land of the dead, where a sun rises and sets just as it does in the land of the living, and sometimes she spoke of a city that sits on the crest of a mountain, a city where each clan has its own street and where his ancestors, called mbuki, healed the sick.
Her son passed these stories on to Jemima, for they were similar to the Bible stories she liked to hear from Mary whenever she could escape the watchful eyes of Ruth. Jemima was slow to read, but Bry invented a language made of simple shapes. He showed her where spirits nestle in the bark of trees and the sticky substance they leave. He showed her the carapace of a locust where a spirit had once been trapped for three days and said he could feel sound on his skin and he could close his eyes and step into a pool of water being lapped at by a wolf and then disappear down the wolf’s dark throat. Bry lived on the other side of things and she went wherever he went. He was five and she was eight. Then he was six and she was nine.
From Jemima, Bry learned to climb trees and swing from one to another on vines, for she was no more reserved than Isaac when it came to play. Jemima ran barefoot, climbed sticky pines in her long dress, and waded into the creek to catch trout and catfish on a sharpened stick. She packed corn cakes and the two of them set off with a make-believe map. When they found a cave on that furry hillside behind the lean-to, Jemima made rocks and stumps into furniture and cushioned them nicely with leaves.
One late summer day, with the field corn shucked, Ruth had boiled the toughest kernels in water and lye to get the husks off, and she took the iron pot outside, calling Jemima to drain off the water and skins. It was a warm day and Jemima was in the cave, where Bry was telling her an elaborate story about a place where everyone spoke a different language. In the distance, she heard Ruth call and she looked out at the sky to judge what was left of the light, hoping Ruth would not try to find her. Mama Ruth was hard to satisfy. Nothing Jemima did was ever quite right, and now the stepmother appeared at the cave’s entrance and grabbed Jemima by the arm and brought her to the hominy pot that sat balanced on a rock and Jemima knocked it over with her foot.
“Well, that’s the Devil’s work,” said Ruth. “You know, Miss Jemima, the first time I kicked at this ground I started a garden and we been eatin of it ever since. Now you go on down to the crik and fill up that pot again.”
“I can’t carry that pot full a water, Mama Ruth. You know that.”
“I know the Devil is stronger than Jesus, is all I know.”
“Bry can help me.”
“You leave him be. You’re too big to be with such as he.”
“But my sister told me to look after him.”
“Well I am your mama, and I say nix to that.”
“You are not my mama!” Jemima shouted, leaving the overturned pot and the hominy on the grass and running fast back to the cave. She could hear Ruth’s protests and became somewhat afraid, but in the dark of the cave, she found a message written in the secret language scratched in the dirt: , Find Me. Turning fast, she saw that there were clues strung out from the door of the cave, across the meadow, and on to the creek. First, a picture drawn in the dirt. Stick figures – a boy in pants and a girl in a ruffled skirt. Next, a leaf wrapped around a stone because Bry always left that sign. It was his signature. It might mean that he had climbed up a tree to watch her hunt for him. He claimed he could walk a mile without ever touching ground. Or it might mean only that she was on the right trail. Trees swallowed her. A stick broken into a cross. She could hear Ruth yelling, but she would not turn back and went deeper into the forest. Ruth had told her that the real cross was made of pine and that’s why a pine tree always bled. “You come on out, Bry, right now this minute!” Jemima commanded, stamping her foot. She did not like this game. It made her feel all alone and she made a mark on a fat pine to see if it would bleed. Then she sat on the ground and built a village of twigs by snapping them into pieces. She thought of the cross Bry had made and knew she wouldn’t be able to find it again. She was lost. She made nightshirts for the stick people out of leaves and stretched out next to them. Bry would find her and make up a story. There would be a hero. There would be a queen. Jemima rolled over to look at the sky and tried not to be afraid.
When Bry found the spot where she had stopped to examine his stick figures, he knew how long she had stood there by the mark of bare feet in the grass. When he got to the timber lot, he called her name because he knew that she wasn’t close to finding him. When she didn’t answer, he climbed into a hickory tree and looked down to see her lying asleep. Her head was on the tinie
st of houses and she had an arm flung out with a stick person in her grasp. She lay like that with her face to the sky and he came down from the tree and lay beside her, touching her face and tracing his name on her skin.
One day Bry followed Isaac into the shed, holding to the dark edges and staying out of sight while Isaac put feed in a trough and laughed as one of the sows pushed a piglet away. “If you ever want to help, you’d be welcome,” Isaac said quietly to the hiding boy. He stroked the piglet’s bristly back. “Two of these pigs were raised up by your pa before he died.”
Bry looked at him, wide-eyed.
“You ever see where he was killed?”
“My pa? Sure I did.” It wasn’t true. Bry knew nothing of this.
“It’s only a tree,” Isaac said. “But maybe you should see it.”
“A tree,” Bry repeated.
“It’s special. There are offerings put there.” Isaac had found it for himself when Wiley refused to take him. Isaac said the tree had a collection of little things – a wooden whistle, a handkerchief, a penny from the island of Jamaica, a rolled-up tobacco leaf.
Bry did not know what an offering was, but the next day he agreed to be taken from the only place he had ever been to a huge tree that stood a good hour’s walk away. Isaac took him by way of the creek and then north to the Shoffert boundary, and Bry followed nervously in Isaac’s wake, for he admired the older boy. “It’s a ways still,” Isaac called back when Bry seemed to lag, “but I know these woods all right.”
Isaac was always kind, even when Bry had refused to share the toy wagon Wiley had made. It was blue and had turning wheels and Benjamin had hidden it once, but Isaac had taken Bry to the cowshed and given it back and now he was going to show Bry where his father had died.
At the tree, when they came to it, Bry looked straight up for some time. When he looked down, he did not touch the small glass bottle or the coloured stone or the dirty ribbon at the base of the trunk because Isaac said they were never meant for living flesh. “How did he die?” Bry asked with his smallest voice.
“A man named Mister Fox beat your mama,” Isaac told him. “Then your pa pounced on Mister Fox and his boys killed your pa. For the pouncing.” The day was warm and Isaac looked at Bry, whose eyes were sad, and told him there was a pond nearby and maybe they should now proceed to look for it.
Pounced on him, Bry thought. He said, “My pa would never be killed by just boys,” and felt the proud claim of that.
“Well, they hung him on this tree,” Isaac said, wondering if he might be going too far. Bry was only six and looked to be tired and somewhat upset. “And he never made any sound that I heard when they dragged him away and then they rode off and just left him here and he couldn’t get down.” He added, “Your pa wasn’t full grown either and there were three of them.”
Bry stood under the thorny tree, his hands on his narrow hips, forced to believe what Isaac said because the older boy had been there and seen all of it with his eyes. He said he had seen the boys come into the yard on their horses and he had seen one of them shoot off a gun. “And it was Benjamin who told them where to look for your pa,” Isaac said. “Just like Judas.”
Bry swallowed and kept still.
“Did you know him?” Isaac asked because he couldn’t remember clearly the order of events. And Bry said he talked to his pa at night, although it wasn’t true. No one had told him about this father. With Isaac, he kicked the dirt and doubled up his fists, but later, lying in the lean-to bed and looking out on the very same moon that had shone down on the black tree through that dark night, he wondered how long it took … no water, he thought, and he cried into the pillow Mary had made for him. No one to sponge his lips like Jesus. He thought he would kill the two sons of Mister Fox when he was old enough and he wondered who the third boy had been because he would kill him too when he found out.
For many nights after that, the thought of his father burdened him, but the hours he spent awake in his bed were not wasted, for he used them to move his understanding forward bit by bit. Three boys had come into the yard on their horses. They had shot off a gun. They had made the horses prance around the yard on their iron feet and Benjamin had told them how to find the hut. Over and over he ran the words and images through his mind. Someday, he thought, I will do unto them as they did to my pa. He did not speak to Mary or Bett of this. It was his secret to hold hard to.
When Bry turned seven, Bett took her son to the site of the fallen hut where Simus had lived and where she had buried the spoon and bowl and the shingle knife. No one had cleared the pile of thin logs away and she told him to take them up one by one and lay them out in a circle end to end. “Stars sometimes fall to earth,” she said. “And they must have a map.” She knelt in the centre of the circle and spread a red cloth on the ground, saying it was the cloth on which she had given him birth once before and this was to be the second time.
Bry looked at the cloth and backed away. He did not want to go into the mysterious place he had come from, wherever that was. He did not want to be born again on a cloth where Mama Bett was even now drawing a cross with the chalk she kept in her medicine bag. It was the kind of cross she drew on the ground in the woods, with circles at the end of each point, and at times like that she always acted strange.
Touching the sides of her son’s face with both hands, Bett told him to stand in the centre of the cross and call out to his father in a loud, clear voice. “By what name?” Bry asked, and she said, “Only call out ‘Father!’ ”
“But what is his name?” Bry would not take a step. He kept his eyes closed and she gave him a push so that he stood for a minute at the centre of the cross and then she pulled him to her and gave him a red cloth bag that held five stones of various colours. She said his father had come for an instant while his eyes were closed, and now he had gone back to his death like great Oduduwa, the ancient father.
At the lean-to, Bry told Mary that he had called his father back to earth. Thinking he had done well to inform her, he spread his arms and hopped about, but Mary narrowed her eyes to slits and said it was wicked to say such a thing and even raised her hand before he ran outside and climbed a sticky pine and was gone for the rest of the day.
That evening, Mary entered her father’s house during the family meal to ask for help. “It is Bry’s seventh birthday,” she explained. “And I want him to know about Simus. That he was a Christian. Before he gets wrong ideas.”
“I want to come,” Jemima said, and Mary answered that Jemima would always want what she couldn’t have.
At that, Daniel stood up, pushed back his bench, and said that he and Jemima would forgo their peaches in order to visit the lean-to. Still chewing the last of his bread, he led his two daughters outside and along the narrow path through the milk gap, sure that Mary must be reproaching herself for speaking so coldly to Jemima since she was one to judge herself as harshly as she judged others. Supposing that she was suffering regret, he waited to hear an apology. But there was none forthcoming. Mary had become as unknown to him as the little lean-to he had built eight years ago, and he ducked his head and came through the narrow doorway to be assailed by a bitter smell, as if his memories clung to the splintered walls along with Bett’s plants: memories of his children cold and hungry and full of their separate fears; of freezing nights, with all of them stacked like kindling on the bed while he slept alone in the wagon alongside a boy who lay on the ground in a pile of leaves. Bett was lighting a pinenut candle and its smoke brought tears to his eyes. “Why have you given Bry his name?” he had asked her once, and she had answered that it was for black bryony. “Which is poisonous,” he had said, and she had answered, “It also heals.”
Now his eyes moved to the wall, hung with its herbs, some of them no doubt poisonous and others perhaps healing. Wondering why he’d been asked to come, he noticed that Bry was sitting in a shadowed corner, fingering a small red bag.
Mary had put herself at the farthest wall and she stood quietly,
with her hands clasped. “This being the anniversary of Bry’s birth,” she said, “I wish to tell him of his father and for that I ask my own father’s help.”
Daniel saw that she had grown to womanhood without his noticing and he suddenly missed the girl she had been.
“Now then,” she said, opening her old Barclay’s Catechism, “seeing it is by the spirit that Christ reveals knowledge of God, is it by the Spirit that we must be led?” She paused. “Bry, put aside that heathen bag.”
The child opened his mouth, but Daniel said quickly, “Ye are not in the Flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwells in thee.” It seemed an unusual way to introduce Bry to his father.
“Papa, it is for Bry to answer me,” Mary stated. “His father was a Christian and he must learn the responses.”
Daniel saw that Bett’s lips were moving and that Mary seemed not to notice.
“And as touching brotherly love?” Mary asked, peering at the open page.
“We are taught to love one another,” Bett said softly.
Mary glanced at her, frowning. In the dark, the lean-to was more pleasant than it ever was during the day, when all the cracks showed and the dirt floor was often covered with baskets and gourds, but Bett must understand that this world of theirs had grown too small. It was all about to change. “Bry, is it necessary for our salvation to keep the commandments?” she asked, staring now at the boy as if she would lay claim to him. This morning Wiley had said that Bry would have to stay in the lean-to with Bett. He thought that Bry was too wild to live in a house, but she would prove him wrong. He had said this after coming upon her lugging a pail of water from the creek. “I am building a house for you,” he had said, gazing at her upturned face.
The Purchase Page 17