When Bett looked around she recognized only one of the slaves in the cabin, a man named Julius, who was old now and missing his teeth. He had been there when she was a girl. He remembered her grandmother and the fine mutton roast she always cooked for the slaves on Christmas Day. “How you been, Julius?” Bett put her hand on his arm. “Oh my goodness, how you all been?” Bry looked at her in surprise.
“I’s good as ever, little gal,” Julius said, giving her chin a pinch. “We sorrow to have you back wid us. We glad to see you and sorrow.”
“You been takin care my boy?”
“Such as we kin do it we did.”
Bry kept an arm around his mother, but his mood had changed. He had realized, in the last few minutes, that his mother was no different than the others. Cleaner, but not much luckier, she even spoke like a slave in these surroundings. Bry examined the flesh on his inner arm, feeling peculiar, as if his insides were made of nothing. Who was he?
In the Fox kitchen, the pots still hung where Bett’s grandmother had once put them over the iron stove. There was the bin for potatoes and the hanging basket for onions. The kettle still made its sound and the stove must still be blacked and the fire set every evening to hold through the night. When Bett came into the kitchen, even the smells brought back her grandmother’s presence, but there was no solace in the memories.
One day, Mary came to the fence. She sent a message and Bett came to the corner of the property to meet her in the black dress. The two women stared at each other.
“What have they done to you?”
“I shaved off my hair.”
Mary saw nicks, cuts. She was at a loss.
“To make myself unappealing.”
Mary asked about Bry then, and Bett stiffened and said, dreamlike, “They work him like a man,” and wiped at her head with the back of her hand.
Bett said they made her visit the quarters on any occasion of illness. Apparently her doctoring was fine as long as it freed the Fox brothers from the expense of Doctor Howard, who had brought the accusation against her. She was doctor and housekeeper both. She looked tired. “I aid the sick because all the purging and calomel and salt has made them weak. They talk of Black Vomit and name it a disease.” There was Rafe’s pawing and provoking that made everything worse, but she did not mention that. Once, he had managed to push her down. “Any of my girls,” he’d told her, “should make me ten or eleven babies before she’s done.”
“I did this to you,” Mary said suddenly. “I told Doctor Howard to put a stop to what you were doing to those unborn babies.”
Bett’s face was closed.
Mary stood at the fencepost in the road. They were separate, she and Bett, never to be joined again. Each of them would return to a life she could not share with the other. Mary climbed onto her horse. “It was Wiley holding the gun when they took Simus,” she said over her shoulder, because she owed Bett this last truth.
Then she rode back to the house where she must now continue her life without husband or child or friend, thinking not of Bett, for that was too painful, but of Wiley, who had left and not come back. Dearst, I have to go to find yor brother Isaac I will return. Ther is meat dryng on the rack. Yor Wiley. He had left with his usual satchel and enough food to keep him alive for perhaps a week.
Mary often thought of this satchel in the despair of night. In her mind she filled it with two pairs of stockings, a flask of water, a pound of dried corn, and another of smoked meat. She knew her practical husband had taken an extra shirt and a mending kit. Wiley was sufficient to any wilderness, but would he find Isaac? Husband, where are you now as I make my way home? Will you ever come back or did I betray my thoughts that day of the campground dedication when I saw you holding your gun? But if I had confessed what happened that day Simus was taken, he would still be alive. Oh Wiley, Jester Fox was grabbing at Bett, red in the face, hands on her neck, calling her harlot, and Simus made a leap at him, but I got there first, trying to stop him. I didn’t want Simus hurt. And maybe then it was an accident. Maybe I only fell with the rock in my hand. Bett doesn’t say, except that I looked as blue as a cornflower in that dress when I came down to the timber lot.
All the way home, Mary spoke in this way to her husband, sometimes weeping, sometimes chastising him for his diligence. Isaac does not need you now, she would say. Isaac does not need you, but I need you.
One season passed to the next. “We hear a new missus up the house,” Julius said to Bett one Sunday and she looked straight at her son with such pity in her expression that he felt a chill run through him to his fingertips. She put a hand on his head as if to direct his thoughts away from what she had to say. “It is Jemima,” she told him quietly.
Bry pushed hard away from her, hurling himself out of the cabin, the door gaping as he disappeared into the fast-growing corn. He ran for a long time, cutting his feet on the ruts and stalks. This was the field used by the slaves for their portions, but he lay down in a furrow, covered his head with his arms, and beat at the ground with his feet and legs, caring nothing for the plants. Back in the cabin there was sad singing and he heard pieces of it and knew he would have to kill Mister Rafe and wondered how to do it. He thought long on this while he lay there listening to the crows and the rustling cornstalks. Panting. Furious. How? When? The thought of it made the cornfield spin. He must find a weapon. Must go into the house. The house where Jemima now lives. Then came a thought: she will get me free. She’s come here for that and nothing else. She’s given herself for me. He thought this without shame. He sucked in his suffering breath and imagined the day. He would take Jemima and go north, as the old man with the chain on his wrists and legs had done. Stars. One always in the same place. The old man waiting to welcome them. We will get hungry in the wild, he thought. We will have to crawl through the woods all night without sleep. The woods will be full of wolves and bears and snakes. How will I know the right way? And how will we ask when catchers and their hunting dogs will be after us? What places bear names where land is measured between springs and trees?
A few days later Jemima walked hurriedly down the rutted road past the cotton fields and turned into the cornfield. She cut through the cornrows, which were erect and tasselled and whispering old grass words. The conversation between one stalk and another was intense and private, but the whispering made a rustling company and Jemima parted the stalks so that she could move between them without being seen. She was sixteen years old and an outcast, just as her father had been in Brandywine. For making my choice, is what she said to herself. Just as he did.
It took a time to cross the field, moving the stalks away from her face with her hands. These plants had been here as small things when Rafe first brought her out to the shade hut where he had hidden a jug of brandy and a handful of flowers. Now she slipped under the hut’s thatched roof and brushed off the wooden bench where she had first sat with Rafe. Months ago that had been and she had seen no sign of Bry then or after, although she had looked for him. She had supposed that she could not ask after him for fear of another lecture or worse. What would Rafe think? But now she had sent him a message through Bett, telling him where she would be. She waited, the bench growing hard under her, and looked through the cornrows until she saw someone coming in a tall black hat. “That hat makes you stick out a mile,” she hissed as he got within hearing distance. Then joy, it was, to hold on to him after years apart.
“Who did that to you?” He levelled a look at the scratches on her arm and frowned to hide his great pleasure at being with her.
She lifted her arm to look at it. “Just Charlie, my old cat,” she said absently. “I brought him along to keep me company in that house.” She pointed, as if Bry might not know where she lived.
“You’re wearing his boots.”
“Whose, Charlie’s?” She tried a small laugh, lonely for everything gone, her family, her childhood.
“He should buy you new ones.” Bry spun around and kicked at the bench.
“Who cares about boots? Look at yourself. I come all this way through the cotton and corn after all this time and what do I find but bare feet to greet me.” She used a rude word in their secret language.
Bry drew her to the bench she had cleaned of leaves. Then his hands were on her, feeling each bone for change.
“I brought you Papa’s book.”
“Did he give it to you for me?”
Jemima wondered at his innocence. “He won’t come after it, that I know, as he won’t even come to see me. Nobody will. But please … I want you to read it to me the way you used to do. Will you do that for me?” She searched his face for its known expressions – anything, even the way he used to cross his eyes to frighten her or poke out his tongue, the way he crinkled his face when she made him laugh, but he was serious now, and thinner and taller. She handed him the book wrapped in a cloth. “I can find a way to come here. It is not so hard to leave when he goes away every evening.” She sat staring at the friend she had loved best in her life and a misery came over her as she remembered him combing her hair with her boar-bristle brush in the warmth of their private cave. It was a feeling of hunger, an emptiness that made no sense, for here he was, big as life although older and worn to a hardness she did not recognize. She put her head on his shoulder and let herself breathe, something taken, something given back. She put her hand in her dress and pulled out her brother Benjamin’s knife with its handle of ivory. The book had been heavy. The knife was undeniable, and time blew in through the slats of the hut from the hot, dry fields.
“Go get my sister.” These were the first words Isaac had spoken in days. He had walked from the state of New York and down through Pennsylvania. He had worked his way from one farm to another over a period of months. He was carrying his rolled-up blanket and a dry canteen. He was foot-sore and half delirious and he threw himself at the pig trough and drank thirstily before he said those first words to Floyd’s oldest boy, who was tending the animals. Twisting one forefinger around the other as if he’d invented a game, he repeated, “Go get my sister, do you hear?” Was he making no sound with his lips? Floyd’s boy looked scared or deaf, holding his head at a slant. “How old are you now?” If this was home, he had come back to it after a lifetime away. What language did they speak? “What month is it?” he asked. What year?
“She gone.” The boy stood with his mouth open, staring hard at someone who had once been straight-backed and clean.
“Gone? My sister?”
“Yesar. To Mista Rafe.”
“Why? Is he ill?”
“Nosar.” The boy thumped at his chest. “To be the wife of he. It Jemima, I sayin about.”
Jemima married to Rafe? Isaac felt limp. He sat down hard on a bale of hay. “It’s Mary I want. Please get her for me. I need food and something for my feet. Say nothing to my father, do you hear? Don’t you tell him I am down here or I’ll cut off your damned tongue.”
“Nosar.” Floyd’s oldest boy saluted and Isaac frowned and lay back and let his thoughts drift. What in hell was his little sister doing getting married to Rafe Fox? His thoughts tumbled in disarray until he slept, and when Mary arrived, breathless from running, Isaac crawled slowly to his feet, bent over like an old man, and she came into his arms and held him, even weeping, although she said, “Brother, if anything happened to my husband, you know I’ll blame you.”
“It was our father who made him go. But listen.” He was patting her back, which felt bony and small under his hand. “You have a brother who has come a long way.”
She saw Wiley’s fine rifle braced up against the wall of the shed. “Where is he, Isaac? You must tell me.”
Isaac said, “Maybe he ran off as I did. After the explosion. Maybe in that case, he could be … anywhere.”
“Anywhere.” Mary was clutching at him.
“There were a few of us running together …” Isaac hung his head and patted her roughly again, as if that would give her courage to face what might be ahead. “… and some were killed when we took to the streets.” His knees wobbled. He wanted badly to lie down, even at her feet. “How is Papa?”
“Unforgiving.”
“And Jemima is married to that devil Rafe?”
“Not married. Just left. Months ago. Almost a year now. Papa pretends she has gone back to Brandywine. It’s his feeble excuse for her disappearance since no one has seen her at all. She never goes anywhere.”
“Our father has never told a lie in his life. What happens when she decides to take a walk into town?”
Mary said nothing to that. There were different forms of falsehood. Isaac was peeling off layers of fabric, and she told him she would find some of Wiley’s clothes for him and bring him a plate of food. There was rabbit stew simmering, even then, in her fireplace. “Do you want to come now to my house? I have room for you.”
But Isaac lay down on the dry straw of a stall at the back of the shed, too tired to take another step, and Mary went back to her house, then brought food and clean water to wash the infected blisters on his feet. She knelt beside him. She bathed and bandaged his feet. She retired the terrible boots he had worn over hills and through valleys thick with water and snakes and festering mud. Isaac sat up briefly to eat. Then at last, unvisited by family or even dreams, he slept for three days while Floyd’s wife Cherry came into the shed and milked the cows and Floyd’s sons tended the pigs and news went up to the house that the prodigal son was back.
On the third night, when he woke to find Floyd’s oldest boy at his side with another plate of food from Mary, he tried to remember how he had come there. Already he had forgotten specific places where he had worked scything hay or picking fruit. He seemed not to have spoken except to barter for a meal in exchange for labour. What he remembered was in pieces.
He told Floyd’s son, “You know what? They’ve got a slave regiment up there. Can you imagine? In Upper Canada.”
The boy shook his head.
“Slaves, British soldiers, all of them escaped from down here. They took me prisoner. Imagine that!” Chewing on a bone, Isaac laughed quietly. So many words it would take to ever tell how the Virginians had marched on foot, new boys and men untried, and boarded a ship and sailed across water as wide as the sky. He had forgotten how to string that many syllables together, so he stared at Floyd’s boy, who was hammering at the trough where it had sprung a leak and asking how they’d ever captured him, those soldier slaves.
“Oh, that was easy enough. First, we got to a place by the name of Queenston Heights. Because up there every name is a king or queen.”
Isaac took a breath and sighed at the memory. “I didn’t even fire. Not so much as a bullet. Though I loaded a cannon. I did that.”
Floyd’s son leaned against the pig trough, gaping.
“They treated me fine. For some time I was with Wiley and we sat up and talked all night. Just about everything got discussed by the two of us in that stockade. You should get yourself up there, boy. It’s just like here, only better. You and your brother … and Bry. You ever see him? You should run off and join up with that regiment.”
“He over the same place like Jemima.”
“But have you seen him, is what I meant.”
“Nosar, I don’t care to.”
“Well, that’s a fine friend you are. Will the Fox brothers eat you up?”
“They got a driver chase around niggers with a whip.”
Isaac put out a hand to rub the neck of the sow that lay at his feet.
He had missed his pigs. He had missed everyone. And now he was back and even his brothers did not come to the shed to welcome him home. “Where is Mary? I’m hungry again.” He began a long conversation with himself and decided he could not take Mary up on her invitation as it would only make trouble for her.
He smiled at Floyd’s boy. “We had General Pike to command us,” he said. “Ever hear of him?” He looked at the plate he had cleaned of food a few hours before and told Floyd’s boy that even when Pike was killed, they
had come on into York like a horde. “That was after we were traded out of the stockade. Then the explosion when the Britains blew themselves up. Rampaging is what we did. Right down one street and up another is how we went and we broke into stores and took whatever we could.”
The boy stared. “Why you do it?”
But Isaac owed no explanation to someone who would never understand such a circumstance. The sound of guns and screaming and horses and mules and cannons rocketing. Men with blood coming out of their mouths grabbing at nothing, calling for mamas and left-behind sweethearts. He studied the boy, who had grown so much taller. “Slaves. Wearing uniforms,” he mused.
That very day, Daniel was cooking sausages on the outside stove that sat with its surface rusting a little more with each rain. Ruth and little John had returned from rejoicing in the Lord and Daniel would feed them, as was his weekly habit. First Day, the Quakers called this respite of worship and rest, and yet he did not think of Quakers or of his past. He cared nothing for his father’s approval now, for his father had never made the journey to Lee County that might have afforded him some consolation in the loss of Daniel and the grandchildren. No consolation, no forgiveness – Daniel thought, and now his eldest son had come back in such unmanly fashion as to be hiding in the cowshed like a fugitive. And why should he not, Daniel wondered, when he expressly disobeyed my rules and beliefs? Is this not still my land? Am I not his father? Do I not decide how we are to live? He added a chopped onion to the sausages and thought a little more on this, feeling some secret relief that Isaac was safe. Then he moved his thoughts to Benjamin, who had taken the wagon on a buying trip for the millhouse. Two weeks he’d been gone, and the millhouse would have closed except for his own ministrations with the grinding stones. How had his children come to such irresponsibility? He could not dwell for a single minute on Jemima, who tore at his heart with her vagrancy. His children were grown or growing, although the best one of them lay underground very near to the outside stove where he was so busy with sausages. To that buried one alone he spoke and he did this every week, reporting on the stray dog that had adopted them and other subjects suitable to a four-year-old. “His tail is long with a white spot at the end, which he endeavours to catch.” Only good news for Joseph, who had no way to intervene in human events, although sometimes Daniel mused about the one hundred and ten acres he considered his own and the two he had given to Benjamin. The Shoffert land was still largely unplanted, he admitted, but fallow ground made the ideal seedbed and in the coming July father and sons would stride across it, scythes moving in unison. Of course it would not be Daniel and his sons doing that. It would be Floyd and his sons who would broadcast the seeds and later rake and bind and lay out the sheaves to be flayed.
The Purchase Page 23