The Endless Forest

by Sara Donati

  She was the prettiest thing I ever saw, was Maddie. Wasn’t much to her, you understand. Built small, but oh she was tough. She could work all day in the field and never once slack off. I never heard her complain. That morning she had just washed her hair and left it free to dry, and it floated around her like a cloud, as if those curls had someplace else to be. I can see her still when I close my eyes, how she smiled at us so open and free, and she come and took my hands in both of hers. She looked me in the eye, the way she did when she had an idea somebody needed help. Real direct. Not nosy, you understand. Not forward. She had the clearest eyes and ways of looking, I have never seen the like since. And she said how happy she was to see us but most especially me, because there wan’t any other woman her age to talk to.

  You cain’t know what a shock that was. A white woman talking to me like that, like I was just the same as her. I am ashamed to say that I thought at first maybe it was a joke. Me and Leo talked it through for a long time, trying to understand how things could be so different here than they was back in Pennsylvania.

  The judge came along just then. I say the judge because I cain’t think of him no other way, but back then he was just Mr. Middleton. Alfred. He cut a nice figure as a younger man, not big but right nimble, and with a fine head of fair hair and a good smile. He was proud to show us the house he built for his bride, for your ma, Elizabeth. I could show you just where it stood if we was to walk down to the lake together. There was the main cabin, three rooms—which let me tell you, was a palace back then—and windows with glass in them just about wherever you looked. There was a smaller cabin out back; the judge give that to me and Leo. All the years after, whenever I got so mad at the man I was ready to walk off, I remembered what it was like, that day.

  I don’t know can you imagine it. Just a week before we was slaves, and that day we had a place to call our own. Where nobody could come in without knocking, and we could sit quiet in the evening, talking or studying. I set myself to learning to read just as soon as we got settled in, and Maddie helped me. Then when I had the trick of it, I taught Leo.

  I know, I am wandering all around this story like a lost calf. Ever since you come to Paradise I know you been wondering why I ain’t ever told you about that first year. I kept it back too long, and now I ain’t sure how to go about the telling of it.

  I will say something you know already about your mama. Maddie was the sweetest, most loving soul the good Lord ever put on this earth, and hardworking? She hardly slept, from what I could tell. She could be sharp when it was called for, but never spiteful. Many times I heard her tell the judge that he was acting in a way that wasn’t proper, but she said it so soft and sure not even Alfred Middleton could take offense. She say, Alfred, it ain’t right to take advantage of the trappers who don’t speak English. And he say, Maddie, of course you are right. They may figure it out one day and take their furs elsewhere. And she would sigh and shake her head, like you do sometimes yourself, Elizabeth, when you frustrated or disappointed.

  The judge just could not see Maddie for the woman she was. He loved her to distraction, but he never did understand her. If she asked something solid of him, soap from Johnstown or a paper of pins, he jumped right up and made sure she had it. But there were other things she needed and she couldn’t ask for, and truth be tolt, those things she wanted, he didn’t have to give. He wan’t the man she wanted him to be.

  Things went along like that, oh, close to a year, and every day she seemed a little smaller in herself, as if she was losing sight of something important that she never did mean to let go. Something was draining out of her, I could see it plain, but the judge never took note. So long as she was there to listen and put his supper on the table and keep his shirts mended, he was happy.

  I suppose things might have gone on that same way for twenty years or more, but just about a year after we first got here, Gabriel Oak came to Paradise.

  All that summer and into the fall we worked side by side in the garden and house, worked hard. We planted cabbage and beans and squash and a half acre of corn too. Cora showed us how to do it the Mohawk way. She spent a year at Good Pasture—I’ll bet you didn’t know that—just after she and Hawkeye got married—and she was always ready to help. Oh, and was she fond of Maddie? You could see it in the way she smiled. Cora lost her own sister in the wars and I guess Maddie helped fill that hole in her heart at least a little bit.

  The three of us, we sat together many evenings with sewing or mending, and we talked. It took a long time for me to understand that it was real, that they wanted me there for more than fetching things.

  She was hungry for stories, was Maddie, always wanting more. Little by little she got me to talk about my mama, and how I got sold away from her when I wan’t no older than you are now, Birdie. How I first saw Galileo on the auction block and how calm he was, how that gave me strength. Master Paxton, he bought six slaves that day and me and Leo were the youngest. She wanted to hear all about what it was like when we was young, but her favorite story was the day her daddy come and bought us away from Master Paxton. She went all quiet when I talked about her daddy. Not mad quiet, you understand, but thoughtful. I had the idea she missed him more than anybody else, but it was a good long time before she told me about how she left her family and friends to marry.

  We got through the winter, spinning and weaving and grinding corn, baking and cleaning. Sewing and mending. The men spent most of the time out of doors, hunting or hauling wood, doing what men do. In the evening folks would stop by sometimes. I would have gone off to the little cabin me and Galileo had for ourselves, but Maddie wouldn’t allow it. Not everybody was willing to take tea with a freed slave, but not even Mrs. Todd was brave enough to say so to Maddie. She had a way of looking at you when you disappointed her, went straight to the heart like a thorn. She was stubborn and righteous both, which suited me just fine but didn’t sit so well with other folks.

  Alfred Middleton wan’t a bad man, really. He could get on my nerves quicker than any man born of woman, but with her he was always kind and gentle and he never touched hard drink, which is more than some women can say. I think it surprised him new every day to remember how well he had married. But newly wed only last so long, and by March of that winter he had backslid into some of his old ways. You see, the problem was, he couldn’t ever stick to one thing. Ever’ day he had some new scheme, grand plans he didn’t ever see through. He would spend weeks explaining to anybody who’d listen how things just went wrong and it wan’t his fault, no sir, it never was.

  Maddie never said a word to me about all that. She went pale when he started talking that way but she never gainsaid him, not in my hearing. But as spring come along, she got quieter and more thoughtful and sometime it seem she wan’t sleeping hardly at all, she had such dark circles under her eyes. If I asked her was she feeling poorly, she’d brighten right up and turn the talk to something else. But I saw it.

  Later on after things took such a turn, I looked back and saw it clear, how she was disappointed not so much in him—though she had a right, if you ask me—but in herself. I been thinking it over many years now and I come to believe that Maddie married Alfred Middleton knowing full well that he was a leaky vessel, but thinking she could fix him which, let me say this clear, Birdie, and you hear me: Don’ ever take a man on because you got the idea you can change him into something you might could love some day. Tears will follow, that I promise you.

  But Maddie was young and her mama never taught her what a girl need to understand about men. All she saw when Alfred come along was a man who had traveled far and wide and had stories to tell. And he was a good storyteller, that much is true.

  So now here Maddie was, just about two years later, in a cabin on the marsh way at the back of beyond, with a husband she couldn’t depend on except not to be there when she needed him. It was a hard lesson, but she didn’t shirk it. That wan’t in her nature. She didn’t blame nobody but her own self. Marry in haste, repent in
leisure, so the Bible say.

  And then that spring when me and Leo been here a year, Alfred got the idea in his head that he had to go off to Albany to talk to some banker. I cain’t hardly remember any more what the scheme was he cooked up but the idea was always the same: He promised her he’d come home a rich man and buy her a thousand acres and build a big house right in the middle of it. And she said—she always said—that she didn’t need no thousand acres and that the house she had suited her just fine. But did he take heed? Of course not.

  That was the judge in a nutshell, always sure he had more coming to him, and overlooking what was right there for the taking. So off he went, leaving Galileo behind to look after us and see to it we had meat on the table.

  For the first week or so Maddie was quiet. Now, it wan’t an unusual thing for her to keep her thoughts to herself. She had that Quaker habit. Quiet contemplation, she call it. I got to like it myself, listening to the world without making any noise to add to it. Sometimes I wonder if maybe she was thinking she might go back home again to her people, stand up in front of the meeting to say she had made a mistake. I admit I was afraid she’d do just that, and then what was to happen to me and Galileo? We’d have to find work someplace, and that had to mean going out to Johnstown or Albany or even farther, with no cash money. The judge didn’t have nothing to pay us, you see. So there we’d be, two freed slaves with nobody to say a good word for us. Scared me half blind, that idea.

  Whatever it was Maddie had in mind, it all changed on a morning in late May, when Gabriel Oak and Cornelius Bump come to Paradise.

  The sun has warmed the earth enough to sow the seeds she put away so carefully, each in a folded paper labeled in her careful hand: love-in-a-mist, black-eyed Susan, columbine, sweet william.

  It’s not so much a garden as a smallhold where they will plant corn and squash and beans. She and Curiosity will spend the summer tending the crops that will sustain them through the winter: cabbage and corn and lima beans, potatoes and carrots and turnips, onions and leeks.

  But one corner she has put aside for the flowers she loves. This morning she has dug the plot once and then again until the earth, dark and damp, is loose and the sweet smell of it soaks everything. She will have morning glories trained up the fence and in August the sunflowers will raise their round faces up to the sun. The flowers are what make the long hours hoeing corn pleasant. A simple pleasure, one even her mother could not fault.

  She is so focused on her work that she doesn’t notice that a shadow has fallen. The shape of a man, stretched out so that it reaches across the entire expanse of the garden. A prickling on the back of her neck makes her pause, but the things she fears are nonsensical. If the Mohawk raid, they will not come like this, so quiet. She raises her head and considers the man standing on the other side of her fence. The men, she sees now. There are two of them. One very tall and straight, and the other only half his height because his back is twisted into an oxbow. His head is canted sideways, and lies against one lumpen shoulder.

  “Good day, Friend Maddie. I was told I would find thee here, but I hardly believed it.”

  She stands, wiping her hands on her apron and searching her memory. A Friend by his speech and dress, and someone she once knew, by his tone.

  “Good morning,” she says, turning a little so the sun is out of her eyes and she can see her visitors more clearly. “Do I know ye?”

  The taller man extends his hand and she takes it. Large and firm and cool to the touch. His fingernails are cleaner than her own. From under the brim of his hat he looks down at her with eyes the color of periwinkle. His brows are very dark, and when he smiles at her the left one lifts into a peak, as if he doubts her word. And now she recognizes him.

  “Friend Gabriel,” she says. “How—what—”

  “First may I introduce my good friend to thee? Maddie, this is Cornelius.”

  “Cornelius Bump,” the other man tells her as he shakes her hand. Bump is a man of twenty-five or so, with milky white skin and hair the vivid color of blanched carrots. Even his whiskers are copper bright. In the polite conversation of strangers he tells her he is come to Paradise to visit his sister and good-brother, the Todds.

  She hears Curiosity at the gate. “Come,” she says. “Come and meet our visitors. This is Cornelius Bump, Martha Todd’s brother.”

  “Half brother,” Cornelius Bump murmurs, and Maddie nods her acknowledgment.

  “And Gabriel Oak, of Baltimore.”

  “Family?” Curiosity extends her hand gracefully, first to one and then to the other man, and neither of them hesitate to take it.

  “Gabriel is an old friend of my family,” Maddie says. “Our fathers are—” she pauses to work it through, and Gabriel answers for her.

  “Second cousins, once removed.”

  “And you’ve come all the way from Baltimore.” Curiosity’s eyes are bright, her expression easy and friendly. She has that talent, she can speak to strangers in a way that makes them comfortable.

  She says, “Should I put on water for tea, Caroline?”

  “Caroline?” Gabriel Oak looks between them, that brow peaking again.

  “So I am known here. It is my husband’s wish.”

  “Ah.” He doesn’t look away, and she takes this to mean that he has had news from home, that he knows about her marriage. “I will try to remember. Where is thy—?”

  The wind plucks the paper of larkspur seeds out of her hand and sends it flying. Gabriel Oak follows it, and she takes the opportunity to ask Cornelius Bump a question.

  “Will ye take tea? There is new-made bread this morning, and butter.”

  “I must go on ahead to my sister,” he says. Then he raises his voice so that it will reach his friend, who is striding back toward them, the folded square of paper in his hand. As they watch Gabriel takes off his hat—he still wears the broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat favored by the Friends he grew up with.

  “Gabriel, you must stay for tea,” Bump calls. “There is time enough for you to meet my sister and her family.”

  Time enough.

  What that might mean is something that Maddie thinks about without pause for the next hour. While tea is poured and bread cut and the pot of butter brought up from the cellar, she wonders how long Gabriel Oak intends to be in Paradise.

  Instead they talk about news from home. The little that Maddie knows she tells him, and he returns this favor. He is better informed than she is; the mother of an old friend has died, children have come into the world, Friend Michel Learner has lost all he owns to speculation.

  “Have you been to Baltimore recently?” Curiosity asks, and he shakes his head. He has a kind smile that comes slowly but then stays. “I have letters now and then from my sister Susan.”

  Galileo comes in to fetch some line for fishing and stops to be introduced. Gabriel studies Galileo closely, almost as a doctor studies a patient, to see how he is put together.

  He says, “May I take thy likeness, friend?”

  And there it is, the subject Maddie has been hesitant to raise. The reason Gabriel Oak left Meeting and his family and went off to wander through the world. He draws.

  Now he takes some paper and a tin box from his pack and puts them on the table, spreading the sheets to show. The world, as he has seen it.

  Vanity and excess and worldly indulgence, and unacceptable to the community of Friends. To his father, who was such a quiet, serious man. Strict in every sense of the word.

  Galileo and Curiosity can hardly believe what they see spread out before them. The streets of Manhattan, a place they have only heard about in stories. The harbor at Baltimore. Boston, and a half dozen villages north of there in the Massachusetts wilderness. People of all ages and races, at work or rest, children playing under a stand of oak trees, chickens in a barnyard, an old woman scouring a pot.

  “It’s like a—” Galileo hesitates, reaching for the right word. “It’s like looking through a glass window.”

  “Yo
u have been just about everywhere, seems like,” Curiosity says.

  “Yes,” Gabriel tells her, his gaze on Maddie. “I have traveled far.”

  These are the things she remembers about him: how on a first day in June he gave testimony at meeting, and never once said the name of the Lord God or of his Son Jesus Christ. That the girls watched him with pleasure, and he returned all their glances but never showed favor to any one of them in particular. How he helped her carry a heavy basket home when they met in the street one day, and spoke to her of the evening light in a way that opened her eyes to color. How terribly concerned his parents had been. How tenderly he helped his sister into the carriage, when she was heavy with child. The troubled looks when his name was mentioned. How exciting it was, and how frightening to know that someone sixteen years old might leave everything and walk out into the world. How she envied him. How she wondered about him for years, and listened for news whenever she crossed paths with any of his people.

  She remembers too the first day she met Alfred, and how his dark hair and the color of his eyes reminded her of Gabriel Oak.

  Much later when they are alone again, Curiosity looks up from the loom when Maddie comes in and she says, “You never mentioned to me that you don’t like to be called Caroline.”

  She looks up in surprise. “I don’t dislike it,” she tells Curiosity. “It is my name, after all. Maddie was my girlhood name. I suppose I think of it that way.”

  She doesn’t say how much she liked being called Maddie again.

  “But you like it,” Curiosity said. “And it suit you better than Caroline. I’ma call you Maddie from now on.”

  Maddie says, “Certainly, if thou feels called upon to do so.”

  For a long minute Curiosity says nothing, but then the questions Maddie had hoped to avoid begin.

  “Tell me about him, about your friend Gabriel. Is he disowned too?”

  “Oh, yes,” Maddie tells her. “I was there when the elders read their statement at quarterly meeting.”