“That’s better,” he said. “There’s a letter for you in the inside pocket of my jacket. You can save me a trip to the post office if you take it out.”
Paper crinkled in my own pocket, but I would not admit it till I saw what he wrote first.
Cautiously I slid my hand behind the baby, inside his linen coat, and felt his hard, warm chest through the thin shirt. He had turned to face me, and entirely without meaning to, my free hand rose and squeezed the hard muscle by his neck, as if it needed to be rubbed.
Astonished at myself, I dropped that hand and slid the letter into my skirt pocket. With one foot in the orchard grass, I rocked the swing, and he lifted his feet to help.
He whispered, “You know letters are my lifeline, don’t you? My house is full of people, but there’s no one to talk to. I need to hear from you.”
“I sent you one a few days ago,” I said quietly.
An amazing thing happened to his face—he flushed clear red from his neck up to his brow, exactly the way I often felt my own blood burst into my face when I thought of him.
“And I loved it, what you said about watching for the moon, like you were waiting up for me. If only you could do that some night!”
I flushed, scandalized and thrilled, then horrified—had I said something to that effect?
We were both so absorbed that we did not notice the approach of a huge pink hoopskirt until it flounced right at our feet, and we looked up to see my pretty cousin.
She simpered with a pouting look, “Mother says it’s time for him to lie in his own cradle or he never will. Bring him in, Nick, and I’ll show you where it is.”
Standing, he placed the infant on her chest so fast she had no choice but to take it. He grinned as if it were a game of tag and she was It. “I’m sure he will be happy if you take him.”
The baby stirred and quivered, threatening to wail, and without a word she trudged down stiffly through the garden, hoops snapping flower stems.
“There,” Nick breathed and stretched his arms. “Now it’s time for your constitutional swing. All the best authorities agree that swinging is a requirement for a lady’s health.”
He took hold of my grubby palm to help me sit and launched the swing with a push that set the rope groaning. As I flew back his way, he caught me round the hips and shoved again, harder and higher till the drop made me gasp. Wind billowing my skirt, I leaned back to watch green leaves rush past till he had cooled me through and through.
While the swing slowed, he went to a rosebush, took out a pocket knife, and cut a white bud. He came back and handed it to me. “Many a rose is born to blush unseen, but this is yours.”
And, lifting one hand, he squeezed the muscle by my neck, the same way I had done to him, as if to let me know that he had noticed it.
HE SENT A DRAWING of me leaning back as I flew through the air, my work skirt streaming, my feet bare, though I had not removed my shoes. I kept that drawing close to me and sometimes carried it folded in my pocket, till it was worn to holes. He sent me others, and I wrote back to him. Why was it, then, that all through those steamy months of summer he did not come to call?
August was extremely sultry, the air sweet with crushed hay flowers, and everyone was in demand to harvest and thresh wheat and rye, alfalfa and hay, and see to breeding of dry cows. I had to get up with the first light and milk, make breakfast and wash up, put up gallons of peaches, pears, tomatoes, whatever was ripe. I streamed with sweat in the hot kitchen, often past suppertime. When I could get away, I took a bucket to Isie’s and picked blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, anything I found along the way, and canned them all for her and us. When Uncle Will’s gray Percherons arrived to pull the whirling blades of the reaper, leaving a flat swath behind, I drove the heavy cart behind it, nudging the ox with a willow switch, so a crowd of hired freedmen following could pile the sheaves of wheat inside. At night I fell asleep the minute dark arrived and slept till dawn, to rise and do it all again.
But one scorching Sunday afternoon, the entire family paused for a picnic on the sprawling lawn of the big farm. The country’s mourning for the president had ended, and most ladies dressed today for summer and forgetting, white and pink and blue, hats wide with flowers on the brims. We played croquet or fanned ourselves in wood lawn chairs shaded by a row of elms along the lane, out of the sun but still in heavy heat, our hoopskirts bulging out of the chairs. In the trees cicadas sang like crickets, but higher and faster, whirring to a peak and breaking off. In the brief stillness, calls of peacocks echoed near the barn.
Help! Help! they seemed to say.
“Help! Help!” children’s voices shrieked back distantly.
I kept my head low, ducked behind my wide sun hat. My dress was new, of the first cloth to come in since the war, a pale blue lawn like cabbage moths. I had embroidered a flock of them in darker blue across the bodice, with some stragglers on the leg-of-mutton sleeves, and I had imagined wearing it on summer evenings to walk out with Nick. But since he had never come to call, I felt stupid wearing it.
And here he was, invited with his brother as new members of the family, and he had not come to speak to me. Instead he strolled around the lawn with the older men, discussing weighty things. From time to time a snatch of what they said carried across the grass.
“Some provision must be made, of course—”
“No way to let them simply—”
“Damnable business, last time, though—”
I gathered they were speaking of the movement to send Negroes to Africa now that they were free. For years statesmen of every stripe had favored it to stop them from mingling with whites to make “a mongrel race.” Some said that very thing had caused the downfall of the South, and before he was killed, Lincoln himself had ordered several thousand freedmen and women shipped to an empty Caribbean island, where most had died within the year.
“Distasteful,” Uncle Will declared, and the others gave a murmur of assent. They walked closer, and I tried to be invisible.
But right at that moment, I heard Richard call my name from where most of the younger men were congregated farther down the lawn. They had all seemed tentative at first, but Uncle Will’s whiskey had raised their spirits now, and they made shows of friendliness to those who had fought on the other side, laughter and joking perhaps meant to cover silence from the ones who were no longer there. Richard had taken charge and set a slim vanilla bottle sideways on the pasture fence, and one by one they stood a hundred yards away and tried to blast it with a rifle. All of them had failed, and now Richard squinted through the hot sunlight to where I sat, and raised the rifle high.
“Martha Jane, come try,” he called. “Boys, watch this, it’s going to fly!”
“Oh, no, not Martha Jane!” male cousins cried, cowering. “Incoming! Heads down!”
I bent almost to my lap, extremely annoyed that he had called attention to me. But here he came with the rifle, exuding whiskey and tobacco. His blue eyes looked cooked in his red face.
“I’ve got a dollar says she’ll show up everyone,” he called and seemed to inhale the wrong way. His face flushed red as he coughed and choked.
I stood and took the rifle from his hand, since it hardly seemed safe to leave it there, the smooth barrel still hot from the last shot. “Not if there’s any betting.”
“Debts of honor, then,” Richard coughed out. “Some of us understand debts of honor.”
I raised my voice and heard it quaver. “I’m sure we all understand debts of honor. Those are the worst kind. We’ve had enough of them and to spare.”
The group of older men stopped speaking and turned, alert. I felt Nick’s eyes take me in.
Uncle Will strode toward me, his beard stirring in the breeze he made. He held out his hands.
“My dear, that is an awfully big gun. Wouldn’t you rather—?”
I whirled. “But I’ll try, so long as no one bets. Richard, show me where to stand.”
At the sp
ot where he placed his toe, I shouldered the gun, closed one eye, sited, and snapped the trigger back. Crack went the slim brown bottle as it exploded in a cloud of shards.
“Lord, have mercy!” yelped my cousins as they whipped off their hats and slapped their thighs. “Can you beat that? I do believe we’ve found a secret weapon now!”
“IT’S JUST THAT I’m farsighted,” I said for the fifteenth time as I stood behind a table on the grass. Mounding potato salad next to fried chicken, I handed it to a male cousin. “I’m not so good at things up close.”
In fact, I could see quite well across the broad expanse of lawn to where Nick stood with my pretty cousin, her dress pink with fantastically large hoops. They swooped around him as she took his arm and pulled him to a picnic cloth.
I forced my eyes back to the cousin I was serving, who had just become a doctor and grown big muttonchops to hide his youth. He fixed his eyes on the horizon and groped around. “Oh, help. My name’s Martha Jane. Can’t see a thing unless it’s half a mile away!”
I smiled weakly and added biscuits to his plate. “Do come back for cherry pie.”
I served until everyone was settled with a plate, then visited the children’s tables and cut chicken off the bone, mopped up spilt milk. Finally there was nothing left to do but settle back down with the other women in the shade. Most were now mothers, and as I approached, their voices hushed, though they were probably retelling childbirth stories I had heard from Isie about how a cousin had a forceps wound torn in her that had never healed, and how another had an infant stuck inside her upside down for three days, until her womb split open and both of them died.
But they still felt the need to preserve my innocence, and they looked up at me, beaming.
“Ah, Martha dear, have we ever told you about Monsieur d’Estang?” an old aunt said brightly, and others sighed, though all of us had heard of him. Monsieur d’Estang was a riding master who had appeared from France and electrified the countryside thirty years before, when he taught the family horses to lift their hooves high, as though they were climbing stairs. He had won the hearts of several young ladies before he disappeared one rainy night with an Irish serving maid.
“Monsieur d’Estang. Now there was a man!” they all agreed.
I WAS CLEANING UP the food table when my mother came to me, fuming.
“What have you done to your new dress? Look at yourself!”
She swiped at my bodice with a napkin, and I looked down at evidence of all that I had eaten. It was a legend in my family that you could always tell where I had sat by the aureole of food around my plate. They also claimed that I would be the first to tear my clothes, lose hats, blacken white gloves, knock over glasses and lamps, launch small children and house pets from my path. When I brought in the laundry from the line, there was usually a lump of dirt in it that had somehow clung to me.
“It’s all right. I’ll wash it off at the pump.”
I broke away from her and walked up the slope behind the house, glad to have escaped the thicket of family. The air seemed cooler here, easier to breathe, and I worked the stiff pump handle till water poured out cold and sweet, leaping bright in the sun. Suddenly thirsty, I knelt, opened my mouth below the spout, and drank and drank, not caring if it wet my dress.
But when I stopped and looked down, not only were the food stains still there, but the wet fabric was so thin that it had gone almost transparent as well, my corset clearly visible beneath the foolish moths. I could not go anywhere like that, and I had not brought a shawl.
And now I felt someone watching me, someone hidden. I crossed my arms over my bosom and looked around. A young black man sat on the coach house steps, staring. I jumped to my feet, outraged, and glared at him. He was tall and lean with strong bones in his face—almost handsome, you might have said. He stared back, both of us holding the gaze too long.
Abruptly I recognized his face and his jacket, rusty black linen with mismatched tweed patches on the elbows. It had been my father’s, and I had sewn the patches on and given it to Tim, who had come today to help split wood for the summer kitchen stoves.
I strode toward him. “Oh, good. Tim, please, quickly, give me your jacket.”
He took a step back. “What? No.” He exhaled in a rush.
What was wrong with the man?
“Just—just—just until I can get different clothes,” I stammered as I began to understand.
Of course that must be what he meant. White people could give clothes to Africans, but they could not take them back and put them on again. I shrugged with impatience. Rules. Why were there so many?
He took the jacket off and held it out in silence, using two fingers, as if squeamish. I slid my arms in and closed the lapels to hide the corset, feeling so awkward that I almost took it off.
But something bulged inside a pocket, a rolled cloth book, and curious, I took it out. It was odd to think of Tim carrying a book. My father had tried to teach him how to read, but he had never seemed especially interested. The Freedman’s Spelling Book, the cover said, with a picture of a black child writing the word “freedom” on a blackboard.
“Where did you get this?”
He looked amused. “Yankee lady came to town.”
“Really?” Before the war you could have gone to jail for bringing Abolition literature into the state, worse for giving it to Africans. It was illegal then even to teach them how to read.
“Where was she from, York?” How grand the woman must have felt, bringing light to the benighted South. York was only thirty miles away but part of Pennsylvania, proud of itself.
He smiled ruefully. “Reckon so. Someplace like that.”
I flipped the pages. “Emancipation” had its own lesson, along with “suffrage,” “Reconstruction,” “forty acres and a mule,” explained and used in sentences. In the pictures freedmen tilled their own farms.
“But you know how to read. Why did the lady think you needed lessons from a book?”
“Don’t know. But they sure come round ’bout those lessons now.”
I pointed to “emancipation.” “Like this word here. Bet you know that one.”
A look of resignation settled over him as if I were just another lady asking things—when he had known me since birth. When I was two and he was one, I used to lug him round the lawn, and I liked to think that I was the one who taught him how to walk. We spent our childhoods playing in the barn, often alone, daring each other to climb to the top of the silo or jump off the highest stack of hay. Once we let two bull calves out of their pens, and they clattered and bucked across the damp stone floor between the milking stalls, looking much bigger than they had behind bars.
“Moooo bawwwww,” they had bellowed loud enough to hear in the far corners of the farm, threw their heels up to the ceiling, slid and sprawled across the floor.
In panic we tried to herd them back, but they would not turn. At one end of the dairy, a broad door gaped open for shoveling manure to a wagon parked below, and if a calf fell out, it would break its legs and have to be killed. Tim knew it, too, but neither of us could stop squealing with laughter as we darted after them.
Please, God, I had pleaded in silence. If you let us put them back, I won’t do anything like this again.
But it went on and on, both of us helpless to fix what we had done.
Tim still looked almost like the boy he had been then, his brown face smooth—though it had some new expressions, hints of scorn. I wondered if he knew of plans to ship him to another continent. He had never been to Africa. His grandparents were born here, maybe others before that—Creolia’s mother had been house slave to a judge.
“Why, sure,” he said. “I see a e there and a c.”
I smiled encouragement, though my suspicion was confirmed—he knew the alphabet but not how to read words.
“Tell you what. Let’s read some, just for an hour every now and then.”
A grin spread over him. He seemed to relax for the first time.
>
“You, missy? You don’t mean you can read? Bet you don’t know right. Bet they was real careful to teach you some wrong way, so you don’t know what they be writing down.”
A gust of laughter caught me, and I clapped a hand over my mouth as a bright giggle leapt free into the air.
Suddenly I was aware of Uncle Will bearing down toward me as if coming from the barn, followed by Nick and his brother, all staring hard.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Uncle Will boomed out. “Leave that at once!”
HE MARCHED OFF without another word, followed by his son-in-law, and Tim took his book and stepped into the coach house as if on errands he had never meant to quit. What did they think I had been doing? It felt like I was five years old again, the day I had followed a little black girl home and played with her until her mother ran out shrieking, “Get out of here!” and swiped at me with a broom. I had avoided Negro cabins ever since, though I did not know why I should, nor why I could not talk to Tim. And here I had been shamed again in front of Nick.
Silently I turned and started toward the woods, intending to walk home—it hardly mattered, since the situation could not become more awkward than it was.
But after a moment I felt him walking next to me, as close as my skirts would allow. He kept pace no matter how fast I went, and he even caught a bit of skirt between his callused fingertips as if to keep me there, not let me run away. By the time we crossed a field, we seemed to have a silent pact, no need to talk, all understood. Inches away, Nick matched my stride, following me like a dance partner, letting me lead. Efficiently we strode into the woods, along a brook to Deer Creek, and walked along its banks to a deep pool.
“Here,” he said softly. “Let me show you something.”
He stalked down the bank, and, missing the feel of him close by, I followed. The creek was wide and clear, rocks speckling the bottom, and its surface made a smooth fold. Nick pointed into it, and I looked but saw only stones.
But in a blink a big, speckled fish appeared, as large as a man’s forearm, holding still, finning, and I gasped. “Was it there before? How could I have missed it?”
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