“You sound like my older brother,” I said. “My father, too.” The bow on the bonnet was strangling my neck. With a tug, I yanked it off. “Where do they find these ministers?” Elizabeth had fallen asleep, her head resting on my lap, her small body pushing me uncomfortably against Eugene.
“I was barren, you know,” Bethany said, touching the dark curls of her daughter. “Until Elizabeth came along, I thought I was cursed.” She turned to look out the window. “At least, that’s what my husband told me.”
The carriage rocked on with a motion that lulled the passengers, making all of us drowsy. I adjusted myself. My skirts were bunched up in the back, my petticoats clinging to my thighs.
“’Tis a terrible thing to want children and be deprived,” said Bethany.
I opened my mouth to speak, but gave out a little gasp as I felt Eugene’s hand insinuating its way under my skirt. Mortified, I said nothing.
“All of my friends had six, seven children, and there I was.”
Eugene’s hand crept onto the inside of my leg. I placed my bonnet in my lap and pressed down. Bethany stared out the carriage. We saw three slaves walking down the road. Bethany yawned.
“And then what?” I said, trying to quell the anxiety in my voice.
“Hmm?” said Bethany.
“The child?” This desperately whispered.
“Dear child,” said Bethany in a distracted voice. She removed her glove and licked her fingers. Hypnotized, I watched as Bethany tried to smooth Elizabeth’s curls with her spit. “Occasionally,” she said, “the Lord needs reminding.” Within a minute, she had nodded off.
Eugene was fingering the edge of my bloomers. Not daring to make a scene, I dug my elbow into his side. Yet when Eugene’s middle finger started to achieve its mark, I pounded the ceiling and shouted, “I am unwell. Tell the driver to stop.”
Bethany didn’t rouse.
“Very well,” said Eugene, abruptly withdrawing his hand. His voice was steady, bored. Perhaps I’d imagined the whole thing. Indeed, who would believe me? “Handsome!” he barked. “The lady needs to get out.”
As soon as the carriage stopped, Handsome jumped down and was opening the door. With Bethany and Elizabeth asleep, I had to heft myself across Eugene.
“Whoa, now,” he said, restraining me by grasping my waist. He removed himself from the carriage and went up to check the horses. Handsome held out his hand, helped me to the ground.
“I’ll walk,” I said.
Eugene tipped his hat as I passed. A covey of quail flew up from the field, startling the horses.
“I’ll send someone to fetch you, missy,” said Handsome. His eyes caught mine, seemed to say something, but interpretation failed me.
“Fine,” I said. I replaced my bonnet. More than once I stumbled. The road shimmered in the heat. As the carriage lurched past, Handsome twisted around to watch me until they rounded a corner and disappeared.
* * *
In the days that followed, I felt suspended in amber while I pondered what to do. To stay was untenable. To return to Cincinnati with no husband meant I could no longer keep my grief at bay. And what would I do with Tilly?
I continued to tutor Elizabeth, cajoling her into reading, taming her enough to sit still for ten—then twenty—minutes before bounding up and shouting for her mother or Handsome or Grady. In truth, it seemed she might leap out of her skin. When I asked her if she was suffering from fidgetiness, she said, Have you ever felt like you could run and keep on running as if you had someplace to go?
“I really must go,” I told Bethany at breakfast. “I’ve overstayed.”
“’Tis only August!”
Casting about, I lighted upon a slim filial twig. “I promised my brother James.”
That night, Eugene came into my room, drawing back the covers and staring down at me. He said, “I know you are awake.”
I had extended no invitation that I was aware of—no surreptitious glance. He pulled up my nightclothes and held up the candle to examine my body. I could not speak. Eugene so resembled Silas, but a Silas whose paint was smudged. He seemed not to care that a lock of his hair fell aggressively forward, or that his collar had popped. His sleeves were pushed back. For a moment, I wondered if he had happened into my room by accident after too many brandies. I could smell them on his breath.
“Did Silas do this?” Eugene said, touching my breast.
I shivered violently.
“Poor Olivia,” he said. “Married to a man who loved experiments more than women. How plucked you are,” he said, touching my face. “So thin and hairless.”
He took my hand, placed it on his crotch. “Could he do this?”
And with that, I yanked my hand back and bit him on the wrist.
“Christ!” he said, pulling back.
I sat up on the bed, grabbed the pitcher from the table, dumping water onto the sheets. Waving it at him, I said in a shaky voice, “Leave, sir, or I shall call the house!”
He rose from the bed, tucking in his shirt. “You think this house would care?”
* * *
“You’re just a little bijiba,” said Mandy the next morning when she came to see why I had refused to come down for breakfast. “Why this happens to Missus Bethany once a month. A bed warmer and a little medicine should do for you.”
In less than an hour, she produced both along with some watermelon ice. The bed warmer eased my shivering, and the “medicine”—which I knew was laudanum—took me to a hazy place where nothing seemed to matter. For two days, I lay in the bed, speaking to no one, not even to Elizabeth, who came into my room early the second morning and stood beside my bed, staring at me with an intensity much like her father’s. She said, “I am reading. What do you think of that?”
“I think that’s fine,” I said, but I closed my eyes and rolled over.
“Can I climb in with you?”
On the third night, I descended for dinner. Elizabeth was sprawled beneath the table with her plate. Eugene had pushed back his chair and was clutching a snifter of brandy. Bethany was dressed in white muslin, her hair in loose, colorless waves. I had the sense of peering through distorted glass where everybody looked like someone else. “Oh, lovely,” said Bethany upon seeing me. “I am desperate for conversation. My husband hasn’t spoken in days.”
“I see,” I said, for I could think of no other comment.
“He gets this way. ‘The world looks dark,’ he says. But what do men know of darkness? The world looks dark to them at the loss of a bet, while we are the ones to bear children.”
Eugene regarded me over the lip of his glass. “You have my girl,” he said, speaking, evidently, for the first time in days.
“Pardon?” I could barely look at him.
“My girl. Tilly.”
“Honestly,” said Bethany. “Let us not speak of her.”
A cold broth was set at my place.
Bethany said, “We thought you wouldn’t be hungry.”
“You are pale, Olivia,” said Eugene. He swirled his glass.
“Sit at the table, Elizabeth,” said Bethany, lifting the cloth and toeing her daughter. “You are a little beast.”
“Not until she tells me,” said Elizabeth.
“Sit at the table like a young lady,” I said so sharply it startled her. “Do as your mother says.”
Elizabeth crawled out and started to take her seat, then ran over and climbed into my lap.
“I fear I’ve stayed too long,” I said, stroking her hair. I needed to get back to Tilly.
Bethany squeezed her napkin. “But you’ve barely arrived!’
* * *
By the time I rose the next morning, Eugene had left for Lexington.
“You are a wretch for leaving, sister,” said Bethany. She was still in her night chemise. “You must write me every week.”
“I shall,” I said, lying. I had packed as quickly as I could. If my cheeks looked flushed, no one mentioned it. “And you must get Elizabeth a t
utor. She’s exceptionally bright, and she should be better at reading by now.”
“I hardly care for reading myself,” said Bethany.
Handsome was waiting for me by the road cart. A basket of produce sat in the back along with my valise. I hadn’t brought much clothing other than mourning garb; I had never meant to stay.
As Handsome helped me up onto the seat, the child came running from the house, her hair a-jumble.
“Auntie, let me go with you!” said Elizabeth, fetching with her long, dark curls. She grabbed hold of my hand.
Gently extracting her, I said, “The next time I’ll see you, I shall scarcely recognize you. You’ll be all grown up.” I would miss her in spite of myself.
Handsome clicked his tongue. We started down the drive, the horse in a slow walk, the child tagging after us, her cheeks streaked with tears and dust. I had not dressed my hair. Loosed from its braids, it laddered past my shoulders like a washboard.
We were trotting at a decent clip now, Orpheus Farms receding in the distance. I was vaguely aware of Handsome talking to me as one might a child—histories about which I had not inquired, a balm of conversation that promised life would be fine. I asked about the fissure in his eyebrow that he said was split years ago in a ruckus he could barely remember. The size of his head might have been remarkable were it not hidden by the brim of a straw hat that he’d worn every summer since Mr. Eugene was forced to sell two of Handsome’s children just to get by.
In the past few years, he told me, he’d taken more to tending the carriages than to plowing. Except for the time they’d tried to sell him off, he’d been generally well treated, even when he was sick and most likely dying (they’d lost three slaves to that fever), and Missus Bethany came down from the house and made them drink cherry liqueur she had made herself. Missus Bethany’s cooking was a thing of beauty. Not like Mandy, who knew mostly biscuits, potatoes, and ham.
“Handsome,” I said, “have you ever had any of Mrs. Bethany’s watermelon ice?”
“No, ma’am.”
I twisted a strand of hair around my thumb and forefinger. “Well, that ice was near the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
I was about to cry. If I started, I feared I might not stop. Holding my hand over my eyes, I squinted at a cornfield. The morning sun was just breaking through, the cornstalks tall and green. A mile down the road was the Harrises’, and beyond that, the Dobbses’.
Handsome cleared his throat. “Missus Bethany is a real good cook when she tries her hand.”
I had gone over and over Bethany’s recipes for bourbon fancies, watched as she sugared the rims of crystal glasses or ground lemon zest into liqueur. Just a breath, Bethany said. Won’t do to measure.
She had smiled at me in that Kentucky way that softened blades with butter.
“How far to the landing?” I asked.
“Just a little farther,” Handsome said. “Just past town.”
Soon it would be time for setting up jams and sorting rags for patching. All day long, the bees had been humming in the anise. Some early apples had fallen, their syrup beckoning the yellow jackets to swarm. I could smell the rising of sugar, feel the threat of stingers, sense the eyes that measured the hemp, awaiting more hands from the South when the work of harvesting would become fast and heavy. That year’s crop was bumper, and there weren’t enough men, women, and children. Just that morning, Elizabeth had seen Handsome from the porch, and put down her book and called to him.
I know how to spell your name, she had said.
Tha’s really something, said Handsome, but he kept on moving.
He told me he’d heard from Mandy how I had stayed in bed for days and looked like death. And now I was wrapped in a blanket even though it wasn’t cold.
“Will you look at that corn?” I said. “Why, if I could, I’d run right through it, and no one would find a trace.”
He watched as I wrapped my hair around my fingers. Looking back over his shoulder, he said in an altogether different tone, “That man’s a devil, missus. He pushed himself on my Delilah.”
After a moment, I said, “I’m not in the least surprised.”
He studied me. “Missus Olivia, might y’all know what’s happened to my Tilly?”
This startled me. “Your Tilly?”
He nodded. “Second one of five. Grady’s older sister.”
“Oh, Handsome,” I said after pondering his statement about Eugene pushing himself on Delilah and wondering if this had anything to do with Tilly. “Tilly is doing fine. She is prospering. Why, what that girl can do with hair . . .”
He laughed. “She always did like the hair.” He looked at the corn as if he were seeing it for the first time. Cornfield gave way to farmhouse gave way to town. There, steamboats and every sort of vessel would be docked at the landing. Three mornings a week, the steamship Fair Play left for Cincinnati. Twice a day, a barge ferried back and forth across the river to Aberdeen. We didn’t speak. There is a way in which a horse smells freedom. Could be the wind changes. Could be a sound. Something beckons, familiar, strange, forgotten; something more exotic than oats. Nostrils flare. Pace quickens. A horse can turn runaway fast. One minute docile, the brown eyes almost grateful for a carrot, and then white and wild with the itch of freedom.
Chapter 18
1837
A late-summer mist had settled on the river occluding the opposite shore. Sweat trickled down my neck, settled between my breasts. Now I’ve done it, I thought. Now I’ve crossed the line.
Almost twenty years before, we had sailed from Belfast, leaving our home for a strange land about which much was said. Each night beneath a twang of rigging as insistent as frogs, we had counted the stars, marking the North Star in particular. We watched our land disappear as the world tipped and the horizon loomed, a full week before the reek of our waste intruded upon our reverie of nostalgia and hope. We still had our treasure then. The distant shore did not seem far.
Not so the shore of Kentucky that Handsome and I could see as if backward through a telescope of time and place.
“You sure about this?” Handsome said, wiping his brow with his hat.
We had waited an hour in Maysville for the steamship before learning it had engine trouble. I had pitched a fit to think I might have to stay another night in Kentucky. As much to quiet as to deposit me on the Ohio shore, Handsome had hailed the barge. Once we were on the Ohio side, it seemed as natural as air to start down the road. Only now the sun was lowing, and we were a mile beyond Aberdeen.
We might not have stopped at the stable for oats. We might not have started down one road and, when we came to a fork, decided to proceed on the high one away from the river.
“You’ll go back?” I said. “After what you told me about your wife?”
“I ain’t saying I’ll go back.”
“What, then? Run? You can’t run without me. You’ll get stopped before you know it.”
“I run once before.” Handsome chewed his lip and stared at the top of the horse’s head. “Woulda kept running, too, but there was this minister, see? Goes talking about Potiphar and Joseph, and how Joseph was a slave who walked away from his mastuh, so I got up in the overseer’s face thinking he the one sassing my Delilah. All that done was get me slapped in the clamps.”
One night while on the chain gang, he told me, Handsome had worked his shackles loose on a rock, shushing the boy beside him, and finally clunking him over the head with that same rock when the boy wouldn’t shut up.
“I was wild, you know. I didn’t know where I was going. We wasn’t but a few miles out of Maysville. I knew about the North, but wasn’t sure how to get there, or how I was going to saunter across the river like I had business on the other side.”
“And you were caught?” I looked around as I said this, imagining the dogs, fearing the same fate for us.
“Not so much caught as returned.” He was chewing so hard his bottom lip seemed to disappear. “Jes’ my luck to run into that ol’ p
reacher agin, and him as sick as a dog. Scared to death when he saw me. Probably thought the Devil had come, but all I wanted was something to eat, and a little money wouldn’t hurt, but he had nothin’. Even his horse woulda been more use as meat than as a gitalong. Still, I aksed for help, and he turned me in. Tha’s all she wrote for Potiphar and Joseph.”
I could hear the bitterness in his voice and recalled the story Erasmus had told about returning a slave to his master. “You good at writing, missus. Maybe you could write up somethings says I’m free.”
There was no denying it. The stories were eerily similar.
“Handsome,” I said. “How far are we from Ripley?”
* * *
There was little sign of life along the river or at the Ripley foundry. A lamplighter moved slowly down the street, jostling his pole. The horse’s head was drooping, its eyes covered with gnats, so we asked the lamplighter, a hunched old man of nearly fifty, for some water. Although I was jumpy, the lamplighter didn’t seem to think it strange that I was riding in the company of a black man. He showed us the way to the pump, and I filled a cup. Only then did I realize how hungry I was, but Handsome said we best keep moving.
“Excuse me,” I asked the lamplighter, “do you know a man named Erasmus Givens? Lives at a place called Enduring Hope?”
The old man shrugged. “There’s all sorts of crazy camps along the river.”
“Then perhaps you’ll help us light our way.”
We rode on for more than a mile, the road illuminated by the candle in a cracked and dented lantern affixed to the carriage post. The forest darkened. Hoots and shrieks replaced the trill of chickadee. Wondering if it was a possum’s eyes glowing on a branch above us, I was about to give up hope, enduring or otherwise, when I saw the banner in the dusky light. There had been occasional signs and flags along the way, but this piece of rag—poorly made and betraying an unpracticed hand—stated in faded letters, enduring ope. The H had gone missing.
“Stop here,” I told Handsome, telling him to quiet the horse and to hide himself. Alighting from the cart, I wrapped my shawl around my head, gathered my skirts, made my way down a path, and came to a cabin perched at the edge of the river. “Hello?” I whispered. I could not see through the tiny windows, for the curtains were drawn, but I could smell smoke. Sucking in my breath, I banged on the door. There was no sound. I banged again.
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