There was confusion in the house. Someone was howling. He heard running feet and looked into the hall to see his mother coming toward him, swatting at the air. “Child, look what you did. Poor Jemima took the tansy. Give me that baby girl and run fast to save yourself!” Moaning, she took the baby from her son. “Go now, child! He’s seen the baby and he’ll kill you sure. Stay away from the Dickinsons’ place. It is Benjamin now who owns you. Take yourself north to that regiment Isaac speaks of.”
Then he was moving. Where was his knife? He felt for it in his pocket and thought of the baby, who had made little creaks like a fresh-caught mouse. Peering around the side of the house, he saw Mister Rafe holding Jemima tight, laying her down in the wagon, shouting at anyone who was there to watch. Mother Mary was bent down on the wagon seat and Bry wanted them to take the baby too. But where were they going? Was Jemima hurt? Mister Rafe had a fine horse from Kentucky and it was something strange that he was taking the mule.
In order to study this fact, Bry climbed into a cottonwood, still in his slippery shoes. For no reason at all he thought of a time in the past when Jemima was spreading washing on a bush and he’d taken hold of a piece of it. “Now you have to do whatever I tell you to,” she’d said, “because that is my real mama’s handmade cloth and she might come out of the ground to bite you.” Bry had said his own pappy died on a tree and Jemima said to never mind about that, and all of it had happened when they were too young to know better.
What is the cause of an eclipse? When Mother Mary taught Isaac and Benjamin, he used to listen from above, perched in a tree. Angel on high, she had called him until he could recite the lessons back and draw the letters in the dust, and she then began to teach him to read and write.
Mama Bett laying Mister Wiley’s table, placing the fork and knife. “Look at these fingers writing words and nobody knows you’re here.”
The wagon was moving so slowly it was easy to follow and stay out of sight. When he rode his horse, Rafe carried no whip because a horse has feelings – that’s what he said – a horse ruminates. But a mule is half-donkey, half-horse and can’t even reproduce. He’d said that to Jemima. Like a half-breed, he’d said. Now she was lying in a wagon behind a mule, Mister Rafe was shouting, and Mother Mary was small with her head in her lap.
Bry had not been off the Fox place for years but he had no interest in his surroundings. He was following Jemima. Tansy, his mother had said. What did that mean? Ahead, he heard the wagon wheels make the sound of turning. They were going to Mister Wiley’s house, taking Jemima there. I am staying with you, he had promised. But she was vanishing and he could not follow her.
Somewhere in the dark there must still be a log house built by my father, is what he thought as he climbed another tree and watched the wagon rumble up the road. He would go to the cave and leave a message. Stay clear of Benjamin. All of them. It made no sense, but nothing did. And there was the house, still the same with its door that has never opened for him but once when the night was too cold for breath. Then the grass, where Jemima used to invent their games. He went through it making soft sounds with the yellow shoes. They had made blisters, but Jemima did not like to see him with bare feet.
The sycamores were taller, but the cave was the same, even holding the logs they had used for furniture and an old plate of acorns and sticks. He took one of them in his hand and wrote on the ground in their secret language. Come find me, adding the word Queenston in perfectly formed letters.
Then he was passing places he had never been, moving north, sore-footed, cold now, his breath making shapes that he tried to read. He smelled the sap in the trees and sometimes his two hands gripped; his feet swung out and held. At the top of a sticky pine he took a jubilant breath, his stomach still strong enough to pull. So it took injury to heal. He scanned the world with its commotion of branches, checking the moss side of the trunks for north. The night was a wrap around him, but he climbed, practising his old way of ambulation, dogs maybe coming and men with guns and yelling voices, men who were happiest hunting a human being. When he felt hungry, he remembered how Mother Mary sat with Mister Wiley at the table and how it was Mama Bett who washed the clothes and swept the floors and cleaned the dishes, which was altogether different than it had been before. Which mother do you love most? Jemima had one time asked.
They are the same to me.
No, Bry. Two things are never the same.
They are equal.
Different things are never equal. One and one are equal.
People are not numbers, silly. One is always stronger. One is always kinder or older or more beautiful or more afraid.
Bry loved Mama Bett because she was strong and warm and she allowed him to live in the trees. Perhaps she was more beautiful, though he had not thought of that. Leave him grow wild, it will serve his interests better than civility, she had said. But Mother Mary wanted to make him civilized. On full-moon nights she read books to him. She taught him adding and dividing. The Catechism. She taught him to read the stars. What river between Virginia and Ohio? The echo of her teaching voice. Which direction and how far? Tree by tree, foot by foot. He had not been more than two miles from the Dickinson place or the Fox farm in his life. For what is Kentucky noted? He had the very slight idea that there were caves in the vicinity because there were caves everywhere.
Kentucky is noted for caves. The stars were speckling. Soon it would be light. He did not hear dogs. He was too tired to hear. Why was he hungry for meat after years of eating mush? He pulled a fistful of leaves off a stalk and stuffed them in his mouth. He should decipher the plant before eating it, but he was too hungry and he told himself there were animals who connive with the dark. Possum is what he’d get. Out of a hollow. The devil is temptation. When he killed it, he would build a fire.
Ruth’s voice. “Who?” There was no light on this porch where visitors were rare.
“It is Bett out here. I must speak to you.”
Ruth gave the door an inch of distance from its frame.
“Please, may I come in? I have brought you Jemima’s baby. She will need milk any minute now. Have you some at hand?”
Ruth opened the door and reached for a lump of infant so small as to be less than a jar of cream. In the light of the fire, she studied the tiny face. “Lord, have mercy.”
“It is Jemima’s. With Bry.”
“But where is Jemima?”
“I could not save her. This baby is hungry, Ruth. Do you have something to feed her with, something with a spout?”
Daniel was snoring behind the hanging wall of quilts.
Ruth said, “What should I do?” Then, “Jemima is …” taking it in.
“Rafe is bringing her to Mary’s house for laying out. Bry is gone north to the black regiment. Keep the baby away from Rafe. I can’t take her north with me. I may be caught.”
Ruth had gone down to the creek day after day, year after year, although blood had frightened her angel away. And in all that time she had never spoken her longing as the angel had told her to do. With the children to raise, the butter to churn, the garden to hoe, the meals to cook, she had never been sure what it was she wanted. Now she gave Bett a warm wrap and all the cornbread left in the iron skillet. She gave her the boots from her own feet and a woollen jacket. She wished Bett well and sat down by the fire to think. Speak out, is what the angel had said, and in all these years she’d had no idea what to say. There was a hill out behind the house that she had never yet climbed. There it sat, round and inviting, shimmering in the sunlight while she did not even know its grasses. There was the cave where the children had played games of pretend. She had never once gone inside, afraid of the darkness and cold drafts and spiders. Ruth sat on the bench by the fire with a newborn infant on her lap and remembered that Missus Dougherty had been her friend until Jemima went away with Rafe. She had been with her when John was born. Ruth had said things to Missus Dougherty that day after taking a sip or two of laudanum before John’s birthing. She had s
aid that Daniel had waited for two years before he bedded her. She had told her about the feeling of Daniel’s long fingers in her hair. They had been close. Now Missus Dougherty barely spoke to her and no longer needed her butter.
Ruth’s eyes wandered over the room. In one corner was the prized bureau, purchased in Baltimore by Benjamin, who was her favourite, even including her blood kin son, even in spite of his upcoming red brick house that would block her view of the world. The bureau had four drawers and a marble top and she kept her hairbrush and mirror there on a tray with a linen napkin, all of which looked very nice. I would like to be buried in that bureau, she had told Missus Dougherty on the day of John’s birth, and the pastor’s wife had laughed, saying that they would have to remove her arms and legs and put them in different drawers parcelled out, then saying there was nothing to fear in a birthing. Ruth could remember the room at its different stages in its different lights with its several babies like the one now asleep on her lap. Little John lying in the corner in a trundle bed. Benjamin patting her, curled up next to her, Joseph in his cot beside the fireplace. The room was a series of pictures, with the dish and the linen napkin always there, although sometimes on the bureau of a different year. Same drawers and pulls, but full of baby things and seeds, unmended shirts. A shopping list, which could not be written or read, was memorized as salt for the top drawer, along with sugar and soda. Coffee in the second drawer, with ground corn and flour. Cloth in the third drawer for piecing a quilt.
She looked at the window, remembering the boy who had fitted it into the wall. He had carried the churn and believed when the angel spoke, but she had never looked at him. “In the matter of keeping slaves and such,” Missus Dougherty always said, “it is an institution to foster grief.” Who can eat cotton? A man must grow corn, wheat, oats, and timothy grass. She sometimes looked at the brick walls rising up in front of her house and wondered how it was possible to consume such quantities of earth and ash?
Ruth shifted her legs where the new baby lay. She took Daniel’s grandchild up in her arms and walked to the wall of quilts. That first night, Daniel had picked her up from the bed as he would little Joseph or Jemima and lifted her dress off her shoulders and arms and set her down again, bare. So long ago that had been. And now, for years, he hadn’t touched her. “Husband,” she said softly. “Open your eyes.”
On the road, an oncoming mule and wagon swerved recklessly and Daniel reined in Miss Patch so suddenly that she threw him. The driver jumped down and Daniel held up his uninjured arm, then lowered it. His head had a gash.
“Father of a whore! You are damned lucky not to be dead,” Rafe shouted.
Daniel got to his feet and leaned over to pick up his hat as if it should be treated more tenderly than a man. He remounted his mare, holding his arm at an angle. The pain in his shoulder was intense and there was a trickle of blood in his eye, but a sense of grace had come over him. “Should we not be consoling each other?”
Rafe went back to his empty wagon.
Daniel rode on. At Mary’s door, he entered without knocking, as he had done since Wiley’s departure. He had sometimes come to his daughter’s to eat a meal or pray with her, but what he saw now was Mary sitting quietly by her sister’s body, which lay on a cot, covered by a quilt. She looked up at her father. “You are hurt, Papa.”
“Never mind.”
She gestured at the room, which was in disarray, with broken crockery on the floor. “Rafe could not be restrained. He is looking for Bry. And Bett.”
“I do not want to think what they’ll do to Bry when they bring him back. I am sure he has gone north, is what Bett says. She follows him.”
Mary put her hands over her face. “No one will show any pity.”
Daniel knelt beside Jemima. His chest felt noosed, the cut on his head throbbed, his shoulder ached; he reached out and plucked at the quilt. He had not seen this child for almost two years, and gazed now at a face yellowed and aged. Her long hair was rubbed into tangles. Her arms were covered with scratches, her nails bloody.
Mary, too, stared at her sister, trying to imagine a girl so hungry for love that she would run away with a man, unmarried. Or was it the other way? Had Jemima loved Bry and found her way to him through Rafe? She wondered how she had lived without her sister’s company and how she would live on alone for the rest of her life. In truth, she had taken too much for granted, believing that anything lost could be found again. Jester Fox was only the first of her sins. She had kept Bett from freedom out of her own selfish need. On a shelf of the corner cupboard there was a plate with two doves painted on it, heads under wings. Mary thought of two runaways, crossing mountains and rivers, hunted. Bett had saved Jemima’s baby through all the knowledge she had gained in a hopeless life. Now she was forced to flee. It would be cold in the mountains. Soon enough the rivers would turn to ice. Mary looked at the room, which contained the meaningless trifles of her meaningless life. A bowl of apples sat on the sideboard as if someone might still wish to eat them. The clock still said its weariness out loud. There was a pillow on the chair, embroidered. Hold Me Too Dear. She thought of the Day of Revelation, when all things will be decided. Is he going to find you with your lamps trimmed and waiting? If the dead could not return, what did she now owe the living? She stood up, feeling almost serene, and found a cloth to soak in camomile for the cut on her father’s head. “Stay here with Jemima,” she told him calmly, with a sudden understanding of what she must do. “I will find a dress for the grave and send Ruth to do the laying out.”
Daniel searched her eyes.
“I must find Bett. She carries no pass.”
“Take the baby with you. She will not be safe here.”
Mary leaned over and kissed the top of his head.
“You were only a child, Mary,” he said softly. “When Jester Fox fell.”
She packed the medicines she might find useful in the black leather bag. It smelled of a thousand drops of relief and a thousand of forgetfulness. Another thousand drops had been spilled in the name of hurry or sorrow or waste. The bag was the gift from her father that had meant most to her. Perhaps it was even the only gift from him, since he did not offer humour or sentiment. Thee is thy mother’s child, he had always said. Tick tick tick. Would her grave be abandoned the day it was dug? Childless, who would remember her? Mary took her cloak from its hook. It had been the attire of her doctoring trips and smelled of something like yeast in its seams. Who will trim the wicks and clean the stove? “Wait here for Ruth,” she said again.
She took a last look at her sister, who lay with her face uncovered, eyes forever closed, then crossed the room and went out of her house and harnessed the bay to her cart. In it, she placed the medical bag, a pillow sleeve full of rags and bits of cloth, and a blanket in which to wrap the baby. Overhead, clouds were swimming fitfully. Birds were beginning to sing. It would soon be dawn.
And Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar.… And sent her away. Daniel glanced at the table. Two cups, two spoons. Two geese flying north on two plates. Who was it set for? There was crockery on the floor in large and small pieces as if walking was to be, from now on, a penance.
On the campground so generously given by Frederick Jones, small huts had been built inside a fenced enclosure. The huts contained crude beds for the use of campers who came with food and bedrolls to the summer revival meetings, but the group that was waiting under the tabernacle roof was there only for brief prayers and a eulogy. The Craigs sat on a bench, elbows on knees, as if afraid to be noticed. The Sharpes were there, looking dolefully at the floorboards. Frederick and Julia Jones stood at the back, watching the road as if Wiley might come home from the war in time for this funeral. There were others waiting to give their condolences to Daniel and Ruth. Among them were three of the children they had raised: Isaac, Benjamin, John.
When Daniel pulled into the campground, a group sheltering under the tabernacle roof came out to help with
the coffin he could not lift. His shoulder was tightly wrapped but it hurt almost unbearably. And there was Isaac, his prodigal. Then all three sons came forward and took up the coffin along with Hiram Craig. They carried it under the roof and balanced it carefully on a bench at the front near the altar. He led Ruth to a seat. Then, for those gathered, a long hour of sitting and shifting and checking the road commenced, after which it was clear to those gathered that the pastor was not going to appear. Nor was Mary, which the neighbours thought was odd. Benjamin’s wife, Elizabeth, was sitting with her husband and his two brothers. Her eyes were covered with a hand and her dress was sombre. Mister Sharpe cleared his throat in a meaningful way. Still, no one spoke. More minutes. Waiting. More shifting. A baby was taken out to be fed. Below the simple cross that adorned the altar, Jemima lay shut away in her coffin wearing the dress Mary had chosen. Ruth had laid cornflowers over its stain.
And it was Ruth who finally stood up, smoothing the back of her skirt and moving toward the coffin uneasily. She turned to her neighbours, nervously smoothing her skirt again, and looked at each one in turn. Each of them had known Jemima. Each of them had bought butter and medicines from the family. “Eighteen of you are here,” she said softly, counting, nodding at Daniel, who was slumped over in his old Quaker hat. “Eighteen of you left your labours in your houses and fields.” She dipped her head. “And we thank you for that.”
Among the neighbours, the women sat in dark dresses and hats with brims. They were farmwomen now, even those who had been raised in far-off towns. Speak out, the angel had said. And Ruth had neglected to do it. Among the eighteen, there were women with knowing smiles, women who spoke behind their hands, and men who judged others more strictly than they judged themselves. Her palms were damp. “One of our children …” She said it so quietly that only three or four nearby listeners could hear. “One of our children,” she said with a little more force, “was lost to us. Didn’t Matthew say in the Bible, See that you do not despise these little ones. For I tell you that their angels will always see the face of my Father in heaven.” Ruth opened her hands as if to show that they were empty. “Once I was told to speak out, but I never knew what to say. All those words in the good book, you know, sounded so right and wise that I could never find my own.”
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