To supply the millhouse, Benjamin pressed cider from Joseph’s apples. Ruth, eager to do for him anything she could, supplied butter and cornbread while Jemima offered to provide a daily stew. How else, she argued, would the millhouse become a stopping-off place for soldiers and emigrants? It was a plan that might have provided harmony and kept what was left of the family intact, but Daniel would not have Jemima in the company of travelling men. Strangers! He left it to Benjamin to ready the millhouse for commerce and Benjamin drove Floyd hard, insisting that he accomplish more than was possible seven full days a week. “We will appreciate the Sabbath when we are finished creating the world,” he quipped out of hearing of his father, who did not bother to check on his son or ask what Benjamin was requiring of Floyd but set aside a piece of Shoffert land for the growing of future apples. From apples, cider. From apples, vinegars, medicines, and applejack. From apples, pies and cakes and butter and sauce. Wood for machinery, cogs, wheels, and shuttles. Why had he never thought of it? Benjamin had found enthusiasm.
Floyd built shelves to hold sugar and flour and molasses and bacon, and Benjamin wanted a long narrow table with benches on either side. He wanted pewter cups but settled for wooden bowls into which he could pour soup or cider, and then Jemima took matters into her own hands. At fourteen, she had no idea of the outside world but now she walked each morning from her father’s house to her brother’s newly built place of business. Her heart-shaped face with its clear blue eyes served her well enough. In the little town of Jonesville, people’s heads turned to gaze at her. Curly blond hair and a small, upturned mouth – she was a rarity among the hardworking countrywomen. Only Ruth was unmoved. “Your beauty don’t earn no points with the Lord,” she would say. “I know all about girls from my time in the place where I lived.”
Jemima was curious about this and found she had two impressions of herself. In public places, she felt admiration directed at her. But at home, she felt undeserving of favour, as if something was wrong with her, something she had been born with and could not erase. As she grew into an early womanhood, she sometimes caught Ruth staring at her and felt ashamed.
Daniel had built his mill and given it to Benjamin, and now there were customers who stood in line, waiting for wheat to be ground and building up thirst. Benjamin had found a press for the apples growing on Joseph’s tree, for Bry had been right and the fruit had reasserted itself. And little John, being more outgoing than his brothers, was sometimes permitted to travel with Benjamin for provisions. He was often lyrical, and if anyone approached the wagon, he would explain the benefits of fermented apples in his tremulous voice. “Remember the bite that caused Adam’s fall? Try just a swallow and see …” as Benjamin doled out a cup of cider in exchange for fabric or twine or tools or sugar or seeds.
Daniel had finally relented and allowed Jemima to help, although she must of course come home before the rise of the moon. Each afternoon, when she went to the millhouse, she wiped down the table and put a stack of wooden bowls at one end. There were only three spoons, so her stew must be runny. Three spoons and seven bowls and nothing to be done but bring in a deep pan of water from the creek and keep it stove-hot for the washing up. Most important was the cider, which was admired for its flavour and severity so that one winter day, when a customer opened the door and let himself in, he asked for a sample before he removed his hat.
“First close the door,” Jemima instructed. “Shall you want it warmed to do the most good to your bowels?”
The customer spoke softly, his words all and each polite. “If thee would warm it for me.”
Jemima’s face felt hot. It was a form of tease she did not like.
“Your stew. Is it saucy?”
“So I am told, Mister Fox.” Benjamin had gone to the barn a good while before to find a chisel, but he’d left his knife and she used it to cut off a chunk of corn bread to sop up the stew. Then she took up a bowl and walked to the stove.
“So you know me.”
“Umm. By reputation.” Jemima poured cider into the bowl and plunged a hot poker into it.
“As I know your cider. Will you take a swallow of my drink to lessen my fear of poisoning.”
“I never would do that.”
“Which? Kill or swallow?” He drew closer.
Jemima touched the knife that lay on the table. She angled herself and dropped it into her apron pocket.
Rafe said, “Just one swallow.”
Hearing Benjamin’s boots in the brittle snow outside, Jemima reached for the bowl and let herself swallow deeply as the door swung open and Benjamin came in stomping, dropping a satchel of tools. His breath hung in the air. “You find no welcome here, Rafe Fox.”
Jemima looked at Rafe’s face, which was sun-browned even in winter. She watched the Adam’s apple in his neck move up and down while his eyes darted from one thing to another, and she had no word for how she felt.
“I have found welcome enough,” Rafe said.
A month later, when he came upon Jemima walking on the icy road, he told her that his chariot was at her disposal.
“That horse looks too weary to carry another cruel burden,” she said, stamping her boots.
“A pretty lady is never cruel. Or will your brother perhaps object?”
Jemima looked behind her, then allowed herself to be pulled up to the seat of the cart. “It is not just my brother,” she said.
“My reputation precedes me, as you said.”
“Your past.”
“My past precedes me? That is unscientific.” Rafe’s cheeks crinkled into a smile. “And my history has been wildly misremembered, miss.”
Jemima bit her lip, trying to stay calm.
“I wager you’ve listened to some exaggeration of a tragic event, Miss Dickinson. And it would be swimming upstream against the current of your family’s unlikely beliefs to try to explain. But do you know what I have discovered? I’ve discovered that what happens in the past is best left there.”
Jemima’s hands were in her lap. She rubbed them together. “Not so. My mama died a long time ago, but I think of her all the time,” she said. “And a wager is a wicked thing, Mister Fox.”
“Just where might you be if your mama had survived?”
“Pennsylvania. Brandywine.”
“Being a good Quaker girl? Or would you be out riding in a chariot with your champion?”
Jemima frowned. “Good Quaker girls don’t have champions. And if we did … how could you ever be mine when you stole my dear nephew?”
“You should be careful about that claim. It does not flatter your sister.”
“My sister adopted Bry. When he was little … just born … she –”
“She did not bother to purchase him. Don’t you think she knew we would take him back? You will find that property is not a matter of sentiment.”
Jemima said, “Will I? When will I find that?” as Rafe put his hand on the back of her neck, and his mouth against hers, and she felt his moustache, his lips, his teeth. Her hat slipped to one side and she pulled away to straighten it, then put her lips back on his.
Only once did Mary enter the millhouse and that was on a day in early June to assist a wounded boy. Mary remembered him fondly. He said he’d been wounded by an arrow on his way to Upper Canada and he’d talked on and on, holding a flute and sometimes blowing on it unmusically. He was the second patient she had treated in her house – young Dooley Jenkins, lying on a pallet in the kitchen, talking about Tecumseh, who was fighting for the British. War had been declared. Poor young Dooley. They had not saved his leg, but she had watched the operation when Doctor Howard came to amputate.
Doctor Howard had been rushed that day, explaining that with the new gin coming to Lee County, there were frequent injuries, more and more cotton pickers to be doctored, more sickness in the crowded slave quarters. “Who would believe that the new short cotton would make us all rich!” he said with satisfaction, adding that he could use Mary’s help at birthings. Most farmers
in Lee County still had no more than four or five slaves and if one of them was sick, it caused serious work delays. And so it happened that, on occcasion, Mary was called to assist Doctor Howard, taking up her black bag and travelling farther and farther afield. But Mary did not like to go alone.
“Do you know what he does for birthings?” she said to Bett. “He uses chloroform to make things easier for the women. He prescribes bloodletting to relax the womb and ergot to speed contractions. All because he is paid by the patient and does not want a labour to take more than an hour. He has so much work that I am asked to take on the Clarke plantation in his stead. But I must have your help.” Mary was proud of her new status.
Then at last they began to travel together, bouncing in Wiley’s horsedrawn cart over rocky trails and across unplowed fields. In the slave quarters, they found a tubercular patient living with several other coughing workers on a damp and pestilential earthen floor. There were children with worms and diarrhea. Men with scabies. Pregnant women without enough food to nourish themselves. Bett’s presence lessened Mary’s fear, for she did not like the quarters and was hardly welcomed there. It also seemed to alleviate her patients’ suffering.
On their second visit to the Clarke plantation, with its fifteen workers, they found a labouring woman squatting in a corner and Bett went to her directly. When she knelt beside this woman, five others formed a circle around them while Mary sat on a distant chair, hearing them speak in a language she did not recognize. Bett’s tea was boiled up and taken and in good time the baby’s head emerged. After that it was Bett who was called, Bett who was asked for her tonics, and Bett who looked after the sick if they were slaves. “Bring the nigro,” a messenger would tell Mary, “as them workers like the aid of their own kind.” Mary collected payment of a dollar for each case and offered advice to anyone ailing in the big house where the Clarke family lived. In the cart, going home, she and Bett divided the coins.
For Bett, it was a large discovery, this new sense of belonging she felt. Field workers, house workers – all of them, her people. Because it was not a matter of skill or education that defined them, but only the colour of their skin. In the quarters, she was welcomed with touches and smiles while Mary sat on the chair that had been brought for her and bandaged an infected arm or blistered back. “They are fed lies and false cures by Doctor Howard,” Bett told Mary during a long ride home. Her voice was bitter, as if it was Mary who had invented the plot against her people by being white. “Remember the boy with the wounded leg?”
“Doctor Howard had to amputate. I couldn’t make it right.”
“And I had to cure the infection he caused.” Rheumatism. Consumption. Scrofula. Doctor Howard’s Nigger Pills. Bett pocketed the two dollars Mary gave her and held her tongue. She was making a mash from the cotton root now that stopped conception and caused miscarriage. She had decided on this course when she’d found two women at one plantation labouring on the same day.
“There are too many babies,” Bett answered. “The women are bred like sows.”
A month later, when she was called to tend to a fourth miscarriage on the Clarke plantation, Mary began to wonder about Bett’s medicine. So many mothers were losing their babies. “Are you giving them something?” she finally asked, afraid of the answer she could read on Bett’s face. The two of them were homeward bound after a harrowing day. They were unduly tired and Mary was cross. “You must tell me that you could never do such a terrible thing. You must. I could not abide it.”
Sickened, Mary closed her eyes, letting the bay have his rein. “It is wrong. Wrong.” She would speak to Doctor Howard. He would intervene. “You are imagining this. What an idea.”
“I do not imagine this. Men are brought in for the purpose. Why don’t you inquire if the women have husbands?”
“Husbands? Those people do not marry. Why ask?”
Those people. “I ask because I have a mouth and a brain. And after I buy my son’s freedom, I will buy the freedom of other children before they get sold away.”
Mary’s voice was brittle. “And since each and every freed-up slave has to leave Virginia, you’ll be sending those children into homelessness. What will they do for shelter and food? And whatever would you do with more children? Wiley will not allow you so much as a dog.”
“Yet I feed his hunting dog, do I not?” Bett snapped. “And that dog sleeps at my feet.” She leaned her shoulders against the rough back of the seat and looked up at the shapely clouds while Mary used her handkerchief to dab at her face, then wrapped it around her hand so the reins wouldn’t toughen her skin.
When the wagon came for Bett, it held two men and a warrant. Daniel had seen it pass his house and recognized the driver and the passenger. He came fast down the narrow path that had been worn between the two houses with Floyd’s two young sons in his wake along with little John. “Shoo,” he hissed at them. “Back with you, back.” The children disregarded him because there were two men standing at Mary’s steps speaking with loud voices. Mary was standing above them, and Daniel was reminded of the child who had stood at the bedside of her dying mother in the same attitude of fury. She had taken the same position then in her clean gingham frock with its starched white collar. It must have been the last time in her life that her clothes were starched, he thought now, wondering how it was possible that he had brought her to live among people so brutal. One of the two men was Rafe Fox and the other was the sheriff, over from Rosehill. Years ago, Daniel had snatched Mary away from meetings of silence that went on for hours, from the careful scrutiny of every motive and deed, from a community of justice, and now she was scowling down at whatever news Rafe Fox had brought while Rafe bowed to Daniel like a gentlemen. “I’m afraid there have been complaints about the girl you have use of from us,” he said wearily, as if he did not like to impart such gossip. “And I can’t undertake the risk of that, sir. The poisoning of unborn infants, sir. No, I cannot! Especially now that Doctor Howard has sent this man to me with a warrant for her arrest. The only solution, other than letting him take her to jail, is that she stay under my supervision.” He scraped at something with the toe of his boot and took off his hat to spin it.
Daniel remembered the gesture. It was what Jester Fox had done long ago, before their lives were ruined. He said, “I will buy her here and now.”
Rafe pointed to his companion. “It is a case of breaking the law against slaves practising medicine and administering poison substances. She is not for sale.”
“Your mother and I had a binding agreement,” Daniel said through his teeth, feeling unaccountably old. “I look after Bett.”
“There is no paper to that effect, sir, and in any case your debt remains unpaid.” Rafe drew himself up to full height. “There’s legality involved here.” He put a foot on the bottom step of Mary’s porch. “I’m forced to take her back.”
Daniel cast a look at his daughter, wondering why the debt had never been settled, as Bett pulled the door open and stepped out, dressed in black. “I see that you have grown,” she said to Rafe, and no other word was spoken between them. She walked past Mary and got into the wagon without aid.
When they pulled away, Mary went to the bedroom and tried to calm herself enough to pray. Dear Father … but the thought of her earthly father came to her and she ran outside, where only John still stood by her steps. “Where is Papa? Why am I alone?” She wondered then, Do other fathers give up so easily? Do other husbands depart without a word? And thought, May you, oh may you, little brother, grow up to be a different kind of man.
At the Fox farm, there were twelve field workers now. Bry had been among them for more than two years and in that time the tumble-down quarters had been expanded but not much improved. In one of them, he slept on his log, ate his drippings and mush, and waited for someone to rescue him. Then word was passed around the quarters that the master had taken a kitchen slave. “She livin up the house,” said Wimpie to Bry. “Was yo motha, wan it? Used ta be hea. Maybe she back
now.”
Sick with apprehension, Bry had no way to ascertain the truth of the matter until Sunday, when the slaves were given the day off to wash their rags and do whatever praying they could do. If she is there in the house, she will want to see me, he thought, although she had sent him back to this place without even a piece of cornbread or a drop of milk, and he had been angry and hurt by that. Now he felt only a quaking fear. For three nights, then, he could not sleep. He dragged himself through his toil and lay awake in a new kind of terror. “The men use ’em,” Wimpie had said. “The house gals.”
On Sunday, he sat with the others, trying to listen to Jimbo and longing for his mother with his full heart. Just to see her come through the wobbly door would make his brain cloud up and then a storm would surely hit him and he would be broken by it. Those were his thoughts while Jimbo connected a long exhortation to a parable. He tried hard to attend, but he noticed a few specks of cornmeal in the dirt and put a finger down to bring them to his lips, still fidgeting. Then the door squeaked open and all of the listeners stood up fast and surrounded Bett, leaving a little room for Bry to squeeze in close to her clean-smelling flesh. He was taller than his mother now and she looked up at him with sorrowful eyes pulling his arms around her shoulders and nestling in. Who was there to inhibit them? For the first time in their lives they found themselves together in the midst of their own people, and all of them, every person in the flimsy shack, was moaning, in tears. “Oh Lord,” shouted Wimpie, “Bry Mama here!” And two or three people shouted amen to that.
The Purchase Page 22