“It is her pride I am saving.”
“Or is it yours? Mary, Bett knows herself a slave. The trouble is she is bewildered as to who her mistress is. How much does your father still owe the widow?” Wiley’s eyes brightened. “Let me pay it and it will be clear to Bett where she belongs.”
“No!” Mary gripped his sleeve. “Bett would then ask for her freedom. And once free she would have to leave Virginia. It is the law now.” She paused. “She has no way to fend for herself.”
Moving to the door, Wiley lifted his gun from its rack above the lintel and ran his hand along the barrel. It was called “sweet,” this gun, because of the position of the lock and pan against the barrel, the strength of the springs, the speed of the hammer fall and the aim. He had oiled it only the night before and now he cocked it, lifting a knee. Mary had once seemed sensible. Her cool exterior, her quiet, watching face. Her uncanny ability when hunting – an unwomanly skill he admired. He had been attracted to that. He had courted her through every sign of her indifference, surprised when the wagon he made for Bry meant more to her than meat or quail. But Mary was tied to Bett by some knot no one could see. He had said so time and again. Now he said, “Bett will survive. She always has,” and turned from his wife. “The boy is old enough to be put to work,” he added, lifting his leather jacket off a peg by the door. “He cannot live here for free.”
Mary clutched at him again. “Wiley, dear, let him be. He gathers heaps of plants for us. He is learning so much now – history, geography, even my Catechism. He’s an intelligent, clever boy and has …”
“… no friends. He lives in the trees like a monkey.”
“Jemima is his friend!” Mary looked at her husband’s weather-hard face. He who paid attention to wind and rain and frost because these things altered the location of game and who knew the cardinal points of the compass by the thick bark and moss on the north side of a tree. When he found a deer, he stood still, out in the open, until it grew accustomed to his presence. But with Bry he lurched and loomed and ordered. “You frighten him so. Can you not remember yourself at that age? And think of Jemima. She was lonely when our mother died. And then we left Luveen and she was even lonelier. But when Bry was a baby she adopted him.”
“You adopted him.” Wiley thought of the child his wife had not conceived. “Jemima treats Bry like the servant he was born to be.”
Mary began to pace. Perhaps it was somewhat true that Jemima was whimsical and spoiled. She often came to see Bry. They spent hours together. She had seen Jemima point at things she wanted and tell him to bring them to her – sewing scissors, a softer pillow – and he would rush to obey. A dead bird must be buried. A needle must be threaded. She made him read to her, saying her eyes hurt when she looked at letters. She’d put her hand to her temple and squint and hand him her father’s favourite book. She’d been forbidden to take it outdoors, but she often put it in the pocket of her apron before she took Bry out to the woods. Mary said, “Bry enjoys the attention and it does no harm.”
“Jemima is too old to be amusing a slave boy. She is what now, eleven, twelve?” He opened the door and lifted the gun and took aim, as if what he saw in the undergrowth was Bett’s son wearing his usual necklace of feathers. The sunlight caught the filigree that was imbedded in the wooden stock and the brass glimmered. Mary saw this and suddenly shuddered, clapping a hand over her mouth. “Oh,” she said. “Oh Wiley, no.” But that was all she said, for anything more would have shattered their lives.
Wiley had not noticed Mary’s shocked surprise when she recognized the gun. The thought of pretty Jemima, with her curls, out in the woods with Bett’s boy nagged at him as he mounted his bay. Pushing his boot heels into dark flanks, he rode through the thickets that surrounded a house that seemed no longer to be his, filled as it was by Bett and the boy. And now there was something else to consider – the new campground only a few miles down the road from Daniel’s house. His hunting dog always seemed to know what was ahead; he could smell it coming, even taking a scent from the grass, but humans were at a disadvantage when it came to foretelling circumstance. Humans loved to gather in crowds to pray and be healed, to sing and to celebrate the Lord, but what if his father was right and the campground was going to bring more business to Jonesville, more travellers, more settlers? Sooner or later there would be too many people and they would overkill or scare the game and hunting would be finished in these parts and he would need to find another livelihood. Right now skin and fur paid for powder and lead and sugar and salt. Skin and fur were currency in Jonesville. But all that could change and then where would he be?
The donated ground was uncovered of grass and full of mud raised by horses and wagon wheels. A few people sat on benches, but most were standing and mingling, waiting for the pastor to bring a stirring to their blood. Soon enough, it began. “Bless these pines and oaks above us,” Pastor Dougherty called out over the human voices and the soft whinnying of horses and lowing of an ox standing beside a cart. Wiley could see him at the front of the little crowd, waving his arms and already covered in God-given sweat. “Bless every limb, for each will provide us with timber for the tabernacle we are going to build here!” Wiley saw his father standing close enough to feel the heat of the pastor’s skin and smell its stench. He dismounted and tied his horse to a post as the pastor began his sermon with Nehemiah 2:20: “The God of heaven, he will prosper us; therefore we his servants will arise and build.”
Wiley saw Daniel under his old Quaker hat with Ruth and little John. All men are equal, Daniel might have said, to explain why he did not remove the hat, and his neighbours were too polite to point out that it was God being honoured by the doffing of hats in this instance. Daniel liked to tell the story of King James, who, when receiving Quaker founder George Fox, had taken off his crown, saying, “One of us should surely be unhatted.” Well, Daniel’s coat had been patched beyond remedy, but his name was carved into the wooden plaque at the entrance to the campground along with the names of other men honoured by the community. “They are Quakers,” Wiley’s father had explained years before. “And most queer in their ways and the daughter you admire being the queerest of them for her tonics and laying on of hands.” For richer for poorer, the pastor had intoned on their wedding day, and now Wiley wondered which it would be. He caught the eye of Rafe Fox and looked quickly away. They had once been friends but that had ended with an argument at the base of a locust tree. He had shouted. He had stayed on his horse and then turned it abruptly and ridden away. Now Rafe put his hand out. “New house … new wife. Or so I hear. Congratulations would seem to be in order.” There was a hint of doubt in the spoken words.
Wiley took the hand briefly and let it drop. “That’s about right. I built me a house and it’s already full.” His smile held no warmth. “But I’ve got a strong growing boy ready for work at the mill when I take it on.” Pleased with this inspired boast, he watched Rafe’s reaction.
Rafe was studying Wiley’s boots, which were easier to look at than his eyes. The boots were better made than any around Jonesville and the fact that Wiley had made them himself, as he made his breeches and hats, his jackets and gloves, was something Rafe quietly envied. This was a man with no need of a slave.
They had been friends in the past, but now the two of them sniffed at each other like dogs.
When Old Missus Fox died in her bed one night the following spring, word travelled fast in Jonesville. What next? But the neighbours had not long to wait, for when Rafe rubbed his hands in the loam of his fields and tasted it on his fingers, it had the flavour of iron and sweat. When he looked at the sky, it had been there forever, glaring. Everything hinges on me and the dirt under my feet, he thought to himself. And he thought he would combine iron and sweat to bring forth the Lord’s unwoven raiment. Cotton. It was said to be a wonder in this southwestern part of Virginia that such a thing could ever grow, but he had ordered two workers from the east and nearly convinced his neighbours about the benefits of the ne
w upland seed. What of the British blockade? they had asked. And he had answered, “They will never blockade what they need.”
The Fox boys buried their mother behind the house and drove a wagon up the road a few hours later. They wore sombre faces as the horse pulled the wagon under branches that showed the first hints of spring: twigs so pink they might have been full of blood, small birds jumping and singing. “Say there!” Rafe shouted as he steered horse and wagon onto the ground in front of Wiley’s house, where a sweet smell leaked out of the chimney. He poked at his sleepy brother with an elbow. They were about to acquire a strong growing boy for hard field work. He closed his eyes and counted the spots inside his eyelids, waiting for Wiley to emerge, but when he opened them, there was only a boy standing on the porch. “Our ma’s passed,” Rafe said as if the child might expect some explanation for what was about to take place. Bry was winding a piece of string around his fingers and Rafe figured him to be nine or ten, remembering the girl whose hut he had pissed against, sometimes with Wiley for company. He had watched his father visit the hut every night. He had watched and counted the minutes because he was curious. Then he had stopped counting and the girl had run away and his father had been killed and here he was as Wiley came out of his new-built house while Eb sat on the wagon seat half asleep, full of drink.
Rubbing his leg with the butt of his whip, he said, “We come for the boy, Wiley,” and lifted his shoulders in a shrug.
Wiley looked at Bry. “You go on inside.”
But Bry stood stock still.
“See here,” Rafe blurted. “You have no rights and we’ve got a cotton crop to get in the ground.” He had his eyes on Wiley’s boots again.
“Could be you do.” Wiley rubbed his forehead with a finger, as if he had found a source of pain. “But you won’t grow enough cotton in these parts to pay for so much as one little boy.”
“We wasn’t talking of payin.” Eb sucked on his cheek, now somewhat awake. “You best hand him over to us now less you got funds at your disposal to buy what your wife gets for free.” He laughed in the gutter of his throat. “Our ma’s passed and we want him back.”
Wiley stretched his fingers, flexing them. “You can’t take him back to a place he has never been.”
There was a moment of nothing. Then Eb said, “Wiley, you start to aggravate me. But let’s us each and all remember what we once shared in.” He cleared his throat noisily. When he spat, his aim was legendary and he spat often, even between sentences, but just now he held back. He was a year older than Rafe and Wiley with a mouth full of yellow teeth.
Wiley lifted his voice. “Mary! Will you come on out here!”
There were footsteps, the fast click of her boots, then Mary stood at the open door. She raised her eyes to search her husband’s face.
“They want Bry,” Wiley told her.
She reached out fast and pulled Bry against her racing heart. “You cannot take him. He is mine.”
Eb unfurled his fingers, as if counting regrets. “That is not the true case, ma’am, though we never did come to collect until our ma passed as she had no fondness of him.”
Mary let go of Bry’s shoulders and reached up, feeling for the rifle that hung over the door. Long ago she had seen it held by a boy with straw-coloured hair and a scarf on his face. The boy had pointed this gun at her father and then dragged Simus away. Boy turned to man, she thought, and she stared at her husband as the old picture came to her, that third rider on his fire-breathing horse. She dropped her arms and bolted past the men without looking back. She might have run to her father, but what could she say to him? Blame and more blame. Instead she ran to find Bett, who had told her that men determine everything. She ran past her father’s house and on a half-mile to the mill, losing her breath, remembering the first time she had run for Bett – how young and strong she had been, how strong and quick.
From a distance, Bett heard a cry of such anguish that she put down the bowl she was holding, now meaningless, and looked out through the trees toward the distant house where she lived in two cellar rooms with her boy. For herself, at that moment, she cared nothing, not a whit, and she ran to Mary, wiping her face on her apron and untying its strings.
The creatures Bry found huddled around a fire in the drafty slave quarters barely looked up. One of them moved a stick in a pot that sat on rocks and another lay sleeping or dead. From a corner, two boys glanced at Bry with indifference until the female, still stirring, curled a finger at him. The dirt floor was wet and Bry lifted his boots as if they had never touched mud. He had lost his childhood, although he could feel it on his skin. Why was he being punished? What had he done? He took note of the faces, the clothes, the sleeping planks. Savages stirring and eating mush. There was wind and rain and he lay on damp straw in astonished confusion. Why was he there? If I run, they will come after me, he told himself, pressing his fingernails into his palms. He remembered the story of his father hanging on a tree. He thought of the old man he had found in the forest. He had walked for a while with that man; he had drunk from his bent canteen. He had led him between friendly trees and taken him all the way to the mill, where Floyd had cut the chains from his wrists. With that thought, Bry knew an hour or two of wet, cold sleep before a horn blew in the dark and he followed two boys, six men, and a woman out to a muddy field, the boys describing the tendencies of the man who managed them. Driver, they called him. Man without name. “Cotton harder than corn or wheat,” the boys said, as if he would understand the comparison. “Don grow good and hard to get da weight.” It was April cold. Wearing his woollen shirt, Bry stumbled along, shivering beside the boys in thin linsey, his stomach in turmoil as well as his mind. What was this place? How long would he have to stay? He rubbed at his eyes. The sun came up and lit the gunmetal ground and he saw that his skeletal companions were covered with grime. “You a sof nigga,” said Wimpie, the oldest of the three.
“Leave he,” said Miver.
“My pap died on a tree,” Bry told them proudly.
“Tink he son of Jesus.” Wimpie stopped long enough to put both hands on his thighs and laugh, showing buckteeth.
Benjamin had sometimes ridiculed Bry, but never about his father. No one had ever questioned that claim. Now Bry dragged along beside Miver and Wimpie and wondered when Bett or Mary or Wiley would come for him. What was he doing in this terrible place?
Cotton. First there was plowing, the ground prepared by throwing up ridges. Bry was considered old enough to struggle through soggy fields with a mule-drawn plow creating ridges six feet wide for the seed. Later there were furrows plowed between the ridges to hold water. Ridges and furrows. The other workers had been born to this, but Bry ached for a past that had been taken away from him in the course of an hour. At night, when Miver pushed his plank up close, they exchanged no words but listened to each other’s shaggy coughs while Bry lay on his side and searched through moments from that other life: Mary putting food on the table and calling Wiley to eat. Bett coming up from the underground rooms to cook and serve. “How is he faring?” she might ask about someone in town who was sick. It was a mystery to Bry, the two mothers healing patients in their different ways, one alone in the dark, one in the light. He could hear, even now, the small clink of Wiley’s cup, since the table made a sounding board for knives and cups and plates. “Fetch us water, boy,” Wiley would say. And now he lay cold awake and wondered why no one came to take him home. It was all a mistake. Of course it was.
Because of the rains, the cotton was slow to sprout and Bry was put to chopping wood, always wet. His boots were ruined, his shirt and breeches torn. There was never a minute when he was not worse than hungry. He was famished. Starving. How did the others bear it? Sore in his muscles and feverish, he was expected to grind his own corn and plant any vegetables he meant to consume. Consume, that was the driver’s word. Something like stealing, it sounded like. He was made to haul his own water to drink in spite of his blistered hands. There was no water in which to wash.
All of them reeked. A corn patty and slice of cold bacon was breakfast before dawn in the dark while the driver’s horn was blowing, and for dinner a bowl of mush in the darker dark. He went to the field hungry and his stomach, all day, seemed to tumble and sink. The only solace was the deep, low voice of Jimbo. It was a cavern Bry crawled into night after night as it spoke of Moses and a river of blood and a plague of locusts and a rain of hail and fire and the longing, wearying escape of slaves.
When the cotton sprouted in late May, the constant hoeing was more drudgery. By midday, Bry was faint. His shoulders ached. The driver sat on his horse while Bry and the others were put to scraping the dirt into little hills around each group of plants. Jimbo was in the lead with his hoe, working fast, smooth, even singing, and Bry tried to keep pace in order to hear that harmony. Once, in the cabin, Jimbo had made Bry laugh, playing an invisible fiddle and pulling his own legs up and down with invisible string. But that was in the cabin. In the field there was no fiddle, no smile – only the mournful song – and one afternoon, Jimbo stumbled and twisted his foot and the driver came charging up to him on his horse and lashed out with his whip. Before he raised his eyes to see, Bry heard the sound of the leather in the air, the sound of the strap on flesh. He had never seen anyone beaten. The hot sun. Green cotton spinning. Bry put his head down, everything going scabs in the dust, and Miver whispered, “Don neva look.”
When Bry opened his eyes, he saw the flesh of Jimbo’s back turned into meat and fell over, crashing into the tender plants.
At the next hoeing, he kept his eyes on the ground. The strongest stalk in each hill was now allowed to stand, the rest to be hoed away. “Ain nobody come to save ya yet,” the driver shouted at him. “Yo mama have to suck on me firs she want you back.”
The Purchase Page 19