The Purchase
Page 21
“I do wonder that your husband and brothers have not joined a militia,” Miss Ransome commented.
Had Mary missed some part of the conversation? She looked at her guest and blinked to show that she had not been following.
“Those purple shirts on the Kentucky boys look very nice, I think.” Miss Ransome got up then, leaving her plate and cup on the table to be collected and washed.
And does she know what labour each cup and napkin cost me? wondered Mary, who was proud of the home she had made out of wood and cloth and wilderness. “My brothers are pacifists,” she said. To change the subject, she said, “May I ask what business you have with the Fox brothers?”
Elizabeth Ransome fluttered her hand. “We bring them two field workers.”
“Slaves.”
“And very much needed in these parts, from what I hear. Will you have yours bring my father’s breakfast up to our room?” Elizabeth made a tiny curtsy, then turned and went to the stairs.
Yours. Bett had come in and was standing with her feet planted firmly apart, remembering a thousand encounters from an earlier time in her life. Once, when she had run crying to her grandmother about a small verbal injury, the old woman had told her that she came from a kingdom where white men had no importance. “Your great-grandfather was nganga mbuki. Yes, he wore a mark on his skin because he worked with the spirits of plants. Your grandfather was the same. Those are your ancestors.” While Bett watched the white woman ascend the stairs, she took a deep breath and held it for some time.
The Ransomes went home the night Mary was called to a house in the hills. A boy had knocked on her door. Would Mary come with him? He was stamping his feet for some reason and it was very late. Mary mounted the bay, packing her black bag in a pannier with a loaf of bread. The boy rode beside her on a lame donkey and found the path up the mountain in darkness while Mary listened to the howl of wolves. “Will we meet up with them?”
“Donno, ma’am.”
After climbing for a while, thick fog settled in and the air was moist and chill. Mary thought of Wiley walking alone somewhere in the dark. Had he gone north or west? She tucked her cape around her legs and kicked at the bay, who picked at the path with its loose stones. “No moon tonight.”
“No, ma’am.”
A growling wind had joined the growling wolves. Time passed and they climbed into fog. The horse shied at the sound of an owl. May he who has received true grace have ground to fear? Mary wished she had memorized poems instead of the Catechism. “Do you know any rhymes?”
The boy took up a chant about hunters and Mary hitched up her skirt and lifted her right leg, which was sore in the stirrup. “Why is the donkey lame?” If Wiley had met with an accident, she would never know. They rode on. At times Mary could make out the rear end of the donkey but more often it was lost in milky vapour. “Are you up there ahead?”
“I am.”
At last the shape of a small cabin made itself felt in the mist. Mary dismounted, tied the bay to a fence, and felt her way along a narrow path. In the dark cabin, a woman lay on a log bed with an infant tucked into her arm. The stench of the place was overwhelming so that Mary held her apron over her nose and breathed through her mouth as she moved toward the bed. “Is there a candle?” As her eyes adjusted she saw four children sitting at a table as if carved from the same piece of wood.
“Where is your papa?”
“Gone off.”
“No one else here?” Mary was stunned. She ventured close enough that the woman took hold of her hand, moving her lips.
“Is there pain?” Mary asked.
The rough hand gripped hers.
Mary felt her way to the cold fireplace to see what the children might eat. “We must light the fire,” she said to the boy. “Go to your nearest neighbour and ask for a cinder pot.”
The boy said, “Ain’t nobody near.”
Mary pondered her situation, wishing for Bett. With proper care, the mother might surely be saved. She told the boy to go back down the mountain to her house and to bring Bett and a cinder pot and some food. The boy did not flinch as Mary used a small piece of coal to write out a pass on a found scrap of paper. This alows Bett to … She suddenly stopped her hand. Bett had not been on a road in twelve years. How would she react to the huge nothingness of the hills? She would likely be afraid with only a boy to guide her. Mary finished writing.… move as she well … and gave up the paper. “Tell her to bring her medicine bag. Use the word emergency.”
When he left, taking her bay, the boy tucked the slave pass into his sleeve and Mary sat down by the mother, cutting slices of her bread and murmuring to the children that more food was on the way. None of them responded. In the middle of this fouled night they were sleepless. Checking the cupboard, Mary found two turnips, three cabbages, and six potatoes. There was a bowl of ground corn. The four children ranged in age from seven or eight to three. “Have you a cow?” None of them answered. Mary picked the children up one by one and carried them to a cot in the corner of the cabin. While they leaned against one another, some of them dozing and some of them watching, she sat down again by the woman and put the new child to suckle after uncovering a leaking breast. How many births had she attended? None. Mary opened the door and stepped outside where the air was fresh. She remembered her mother and wondered if there had been this smell of putrefying flesh. The fog had cleared. Millions of stars were studding the sky and she thought of the boy alone on the mountainside travelling by their light. The donkey was grazing and she could make out the shape of a cow behind a spindly gate. Someone had brought a wife and children to this high, hidden place, built a cabin, and put up a fence. She opened the gate and the cow lumbered to her feet and lowered her head. “Pail,” said Mary, too late, as she saw the swollen udder, but she turned then and the cow moved fast and rammed her hard against the fence. Collecting herself, she found the pail hanging on a hook at the side of the cabin, and when the cow saw the pail she mooed and stood to be milked. Mary thought of Ruth and the thousands of hours her stepmother had spent on her milking stool. All for us, she thought guiltily, and so that Papa could have back Miss Patch. She had been unchristian to her stepmother and this wicked cow was giving good milk. When Mary looked up she saw the four children standing outside the fence holding hands against the night. A wind had come up again. She took the pail to them and let them drink.
When Bett and the boy arrived at dawn, riding the horse together and carrying a small pot of fire, Mary was sitting by a dead woman and her baby. She woke slowly, finding her way into the present as if she had followed the dead woman’s spirit into the thick laurel brambles that covered the mountainside. As if she had been there beside her, both of them looking for their lost husbands. She shook herself and went to the cot where the four children were nestled. Who will care for them? she lamented as the boy lifted the baby from the cradle and gentled it, cooing in a universal language. The sun had begun its slow crawl through the glassine windowpane and into a corner of the cabin. It brought no warmth but the thought of warmth, and Bett lit the fire and began to cut up the turnip and a wilted cabbage. She looked at the boy. “Is your papa coming back?”
The boy looked at his mother, who could no longer help him guess.
“We are going to wake the little ones and you must take them outside while I make breakfast. Do you know how to milk?”
“My ma does it. She –”
“Not anymore she does not,” Mary snapped.
The boy looked surprised. He had not yet taken his jacket off and now he went to his mother, sidling up, and laid a hand on her. Mary saw that he did not understand, being a child of this wild place. “She will not wake. Has thee seen nothing die?” It was an intolerant question but it had been asked. “It is time to take your brother and sisters to wash.” The boy was given instructions. He was to take them to the latrine first and then the rain barrel. When they had filed out, Mary shut and bolted the door and looked at Bett. “Thank you for coming.”
Mary filled a pan with water and soap and a little camphor from her bag. Now they dragged a wet cloth from hairline downwards over the face and then over the neck and around the shoulders and armpits and breasts. “Her milk is still leaking,” said Mary in horror. “Shall I save it?” Beside them, the infant was unaccountably calm. “Shall I?” She squeezed tenderly at the right breast, but at that, the baby began to squall. Bett lifted it and put it on the hardening flesh, but the baby squalled harder at the smell of camphor and death and Bett took it quickly away and warmed up some milk. Mary continued the washing, finding all the quiet places and dark places and known and unknown places on her patient’s body. She found a black dress in the chest and Bett still held the baby as Mary got its dead mother into a sitting position and held the open neck of the dress over the drooping head. Mary wondered about a chemise but pulled the dress down while lifting an arm. Had this poor woman delivered herself of her child? Had her husband gone for help and met with an accident? She lifted the other arm and inserted it into a sleeve. “Silk,” she said in some disbelief. She found bloomers, and when Bett put the baby back in its cradle, the two living women pulled the bloomers up over the dead woman’s hips. They rolled her over and stripped her bed and lay her out on the straw mattress and looked next at her hair. “We could make plaits.” Now the woman was turned face down while they found her brush and began to work. The hair was oily and tangled, but they brushed it until it shone and then Bett began to braid it, slowly and carefully as if she had been braiding hair all her life. Mary studied the woman’s hands, one of which had been burned and neither of which was adorned. The hands were large and calloused as they had needed to be.
“What do we do with her feet?”
“She needs no shoes in her grave.”
Mary was watching Bett move her hands over the woman’s body, then turning it over to lay a cloth soaked in camphor across the unseeing face. Coins. They must be silver. Mary searched through the chest and through the cupboard, where she found four shillings. “We can put them back when she is in her grave.”
They stood for a minute and stared. The woman looked refreshed, as if she might rise up and put the coins in her pocket and hold her baby to her breast. The morning arrived and the full tilt of sun hit the lonely room as Bett lit two tallow candles, one for the head and one for the two bare feet.
They did not leave but waited in the dead woman’s house for many days, Mary tending the motherless children while Bett roamed the hills, gathering curled ferns and wild fruit. She made a drink for all of them, naming it heartbreak tea. She taught the children where to find berries while Mary used a snare for birds. It was a time that brought back the years they had lived so closely together in the lean-to, sharing the care of Bry, sharing meals, sharing what could be shared. To the children, they told stories. To each other, they remarked on the variousness of the orphans – this one shy, that one demanding. Perhaps they would take them all home in the wagon and keep them for good. “From now on you must travel with me,” Mary said, pleased at this notion. “We will charge by the patient, as Doctor Howard does. There is need for us.”
“You sell my medicines as your own,” Bett said, acknowledging this for the first time.
Mary flushed. “We will share everything.”
The two women worked in harmony then, even digging the grave together, which took three full days. When they had it dug, they lifted the dead woman with the help of a sheet held at both ends and laid her out on a bed of leaves. Mary looked at Bett and was grateful.
In the late afternoon of the third day, four children stood above the hole in the ground that cradled their mother while Mary cradled the dead woman’s baby in her arms. The children had complained about the cabin’s smell, and they were relieved when it followed their mother’s stiffened body out into the hole, although they peered down at her wistfully. The boy, whose name was Ephraim, was angry. He wanted his mother left above ground until his father came home. How was he going to explain his mother’s disappearance, otherwise? But Mary promised to stay until an explanation could be offered to someone, whoever came. “Have you relations?”
The boy did not answer.
It was customary to ring a bell when a person was buried – one toll for each year of life – but there was no bell in the house and no one to hear it so the children threw a heap of fresh dirt into the grave and covered it with leaves. They stood in clean clothes and Mary told them to walk around the little mound they had made three full times in order to create a ceremony. Afterwards, the children brought sticks and stones and leaves and created a picture on top of the grave. The picture showed a sky with rock clouds and four stick figures sitting by a grave with a baby. Mama, Ephraim scratched in the dirt. Mary told them to make a story about themselves. “When my mother died, I told her all my secrets. She is someone you can talk to now about anything.” It wasn’t true, but the lie might help.
“I, Julia,” said the seven-year-old, standing by the grave, “am your next to oldest and very careful in my needlework and very good to my brothers, Mama.”
“I am Matlock,” said the five-year-old. “See?” He held up five fingers.
They circled the grave while Ephraim sang the chant of the hunter and wolves that had brought Mary to their rescue. Later they went about their small tasks – foraging, cooking, washing, milking – until on the twelfth day they heard the neighing of a horse and the children rushed into the forest to greet their father, who had a sack of flour hanging by his stirrups and a box of provisions tied behind his saddle pack. He had not gone for a doctor. He had helped his wife deliver their fifth child and then ridden his horse away in order to feed his family. Bett showed him how to feed the infant using a small vessel with a spout. He did not require much instruction, but noted that the companionship and help of an adult would be missed. As Mary walked with him to the pasture to show him the donkey’s wrapped leg, he touched her hand and thanked her and asked if she had a husband where she lived or if she would like to stay on with him.
When the two women made the journey down from the mountain on Wiley’s Bay, Mary’s arms were wrapped around Bett in order to hold well to the reins. Passing Daniel’s house, they saw him standing on the plank steps as if waiting. “Papa? We are restored to civilization!”
“To what end, dear one? We have both lost everything.” Daniel stared at a spot of nothing over Mary’s head. “Your husband came home to find his house empty but for a note you had left in the middle of the night. Now he has followed your brother, who has gone off to fight the British.” Daniel’s fingers fussed at his sides.
Mary slid off the horse. “Which brother?” she asked, though she was thinking only of Wiley. “How – When did this happen?”
“He wanted to take Isaac’s place at the mill. I told him to go find your brother and bring him back and then we might talk about partnership.” Daniel paused. “Imagine him, thinking he could take Isaac’s place.… ”
Mary did not remount the horse but took hold of the reins and led him past her father while Bett sat above her, clinging to the shaggy mane. Mary’s mind was flooded with words but she did not voice them. Instead, a sound strange to her came out of her throat, a pent-up keening, while she held the reins and walked beside the horse her husband had not had for his journey.
They called it a war, but it was a thing any boy would be longing to join, and a few days later Benjamin brought out a musket he had acquired and began to polish it in the presence of his father. It had become a tradition in the family to eat the Sunday midday meal outside when the weather allowed because Daniel had bought an iron stove for the kitchen he was still planning to build. It sat with its chimney poked into the trees and Daniel talked to himself as he co
oked while Ruth and little John went to Pastor Dougherty’s Sunday Prayer Meeting.
It was the proximity of Joseph’s grave that inspired Daniel’s talk, usually of the weather and the animals and always of Isaac and Benjamin and Jemima. This morning Ruth had killed one of her chickens and Daniel now tossed it in a bag with flour and salt. He was heating a skillet when Benjamin appeared with the musket and, shocked beyond anger, Daniel dropped the floured chicken on the bare ground. “Here now. Whoa. Benjamin, there are plenty of trigger-happy boys to stand with your brother in this fight.” He pointed to the outside table, and Benjamin sat down. “Listen now, son. War is no place for those of us who do not espouse violence even in a noble cause, which this is not.” Daniel had bent over to retrieve the chicken and was dusting it off with his hand. Then he came to Benjamin and touched his sleeve, leaving a floury mark. “Surely you must agree,” he said. “Or have I wasted my life on two unworthy sons?”
Benjamin inhaled slowly, as if measuring something finite.
“There will be more travel on our road now,” Daniel went on, plucking miserably at the sleeve. “The mill will serve your country’s needs better than your death will do.”
Benjamin put his head back and looked into the trees he knew were his father’s to cut or let stand, to give to his children or burn to the ground. “All right, Father,” he said, using the title the children never used. “Give me a deed to it and the two front acres.”
Daniel gaped at his son, plainly mortified by Benjamin’s willingness to take what had not been offered. Had Benjamin never noticed the example he’d set, treading the narrow path of virtue through unmarked woods? Forest? Jungle! “A deed? But then I must have your promise –”
Benjamin laughed. “Pap! A Quaker does not make a vow.”
Heartsick, bullied, Daniel rode into Jonesville the following day and drew up a deed to the mill. He could never manage his farm without one son at the very least, and John was too young and never a worker. John’s nose was always in a book. Constrained, put upon, bargained out of his land, he put Floyd’s oldest boy in charge of the pigs Isaac had abandoned, although two of the sows wandered off within hours and were not seen again. Floyd’s younger son was given the job of the small milk herd. “Five cows,” Daniel teased the boy. “You must count to four and add on one. Or three and add on two. But never subtract, as your brother did with the pigs.” The boy, who was six, had to drive the cows to pasture, return to the house, hitch Miss Patch to a cart, and haul water up from the spring. There was now a tank near the kitchen door that must be filled. Once that was done, he took food to his father and brother, knowing that he was a boy of some consequence.