Purebred (4 page)

Jessie had converted an old garage into a studio and darkroom, and attached to the back of it were two comfortable apartments—one for her, and one for Grand Alice. A big semidetached garage held farm equipment, and a smaller building contained Uncle John’s workshop.

Carole’s favorite building, of course, was the barn. It was small, but sturdily built and very old. “The timbers were cut by hand.” Louise pointed to the solid wood beams that crisscrossed the hay loft. Carole nodded. Moose Hill, where she had gone to riding camp, had had a barn something like this one.

“These are the horses.” Saying that, Louise’s voice took on an affectionate tone, and she sounded more like one of
Carole’s friends than she had so far. At least we have horses in common, Carole thought.

“This one’s mine. His name is Jiminy Cricket.”

Louise opened the first stall and stepped inside. Carole followed. Jiminy Cricket was a beautiful bay with an elegantly arched neck and long, flowing mane. He wore a thick plaid horse blanket securely buckled around his body.

“He’s beautiful,” Carole breathed. She held her palm out flat for Jiminy to smell, and wished she’d remembered to bring some horse treats. “He’s the same color as my horse, Starlight.”

“What kind of horse is Starlight?” asked Louise.

“He’s a hunter—well, hunter-jumper; I want to make a jumper out of him some day.”

“No, I mean what kind—Jiminy’s a registered Morgan.”

“Oh. Starlight’s not registered anything. He’s got a lot of Thoroughbred in him, and some Arabian, I think, and probably some quarter horse. He jumps very well, and he’s agile, but he’s not as lean and leggy as your typical Thoroughbred.”

“Hmm.” Louise looked distinctly unimpressed. She moved to the second stall. “This is Kismet, Aunt Jessie’s mare. She’s a purebred Arabian.” Like Jiminy, Kismet was heavily blanketed. Carole admired her dainty face, and scratched her behind her ears.

“She loves that,” Louise said. She waved her hand
toward the remaining stalls. “This one is Sugar and that one’s called Spice.”

“I know a horse named Spice,” Carole said. “She’s a Thoroughbred.”

Louise laughed. “This Spice is no Thoroughbred. Have a look.” Carole opened the stall door. Spice, indeed, was no Thoroughbred, but a massive bay workhorse, with great lumbering hooves and kind eyes. He wasn’t wearing a blanket, and to Carole his shaggy winter coat looked as thick and rough as a polar bear’s.

Louise patted Spice affectionately. “He and Sugar are just plain old mixed-breed part-draft workhorses,” she said. “We actually still use them for chores, especially in the wintertime. They start a lot more reliably than the tractor.”

Sugar, the mare, was like Spice but gray-haired. She poked her nose out of her stall door and Carole and Louise patted her too. “Nice horses,” Carole said.

“Hmm.”

Before they went back to the house, Louise checked the water in each horse’s stall. “Sometimes the heaters give out, and the water freezes,” she explained. “The horses have to eat so much hay to keep warm when it’s this cold, that if they don’t have water they can get colic really quickly. So we have to be careful to check. Usually the heaters are fine.”

Carole was intrigued. “Heaters in the water buckets?”

Louise looked a little surprised. “Sure. I mean, otherwise we’d be hauling water all day. It only takes a few hours for an unheated bucket to freeze solid.”

“It’s a neat idea.”

Louise shrugged. “To us, it’s just normal.”

They headed inside for dessert.

W
HEN
C
AROLE AND
Louise walked up to the main house, they saw a black snowmobile parked in the driveway. Louise brightened. “Christina’s here,” she said, and hurried for the door.

“Who?” Carole followed her.

“Christina. My friend. Come on.”

Inside, Aunt Lily was dishing up apple cobbler and talking to a girl with short blond hair and blue-gray eyes.

The girl turned as they entered, and smiled. “Hey, Louise,” she said. “I thought I’d come by.”

“Hey,” Louise said back. “This is my cousin Carole—remember, I told you she was coming. Carole, this is Christina Johnson. She lives down the road. We take the same bus to school.”

“Hi,” Carole said. Christina grinned. Carole was struck by the difference between her and Louise. Louise still seemed to be on her guard, but Christina’s manner was openly welcoming—Carole liked Christina right from the start.

They sat down in the kitchen to eat the apple cobbler. Christina had been to Nyberg earlier that day and had seen some other friends of theirs in town. “Karalee, she got a Christmas present from John Harding—” she told Louise excitedly.

“No!” Louise said, her spoon halfway to her mouth.

“Yes! And she said—”

“Wait! What’d he give her?”

“I don’t know. Earrings? Something like that …” Carole reached up to check on her own earrings. They were still there. “Anyway,” Christina continued, “Karalee said—”

“You saw Karalee?”

“No, I saw Jen. But Jen saw Lauren, and Lauren saw Karalee, and Jen said that Lauren said that Karalee said that she thought John was really, really cute.”

“Really?”

“Really. Better yet”—Christina leaned in toward both Louise and Carole—“Tim asked Jen to go with him!”

“What did she say?” asked Carole. She couldn’t help but feel interested.

“She’s thinking about it,” said Christina. “They might
go to the movies this week, if Tim can get his mom to drive them.”

“Wow.” Louise leaned back in her chair. “I don’t know why she just doesn’t say yes. He’s had a crush on her for forever. Do you have a boyfriend, Carole?”

“Sort of.” Carole told them about Cam. “We don’t get to see each other very often.”

Aunt Lily, who had been out in the living room with the rest of the family, came back into the kitchen and smiled at them. She reached into the pantry, grabbed something off the shelf, and tossed it to Louise.

“Marshmallows!” said Louise. “What a great idea!” The three girls adjourned to the living room, where Grand Alice, Uncle John, Aunt Jessie, and Colonel Hanson sat talking in front of a big open fire. Louise produced some long-handled forks.

“The secret,” said Aunt Jessie, taking a fork and bending low before the fire, “is to keep turning your marshmallow around and around over some nice red coals, to get it perfectly brown and even.” Carole noticed that Louise turned hers around and around and made perfect marshmallows too. Carole had always preferred hers burnt. She thrust her marshmallow right into the fire.

“The secret,” said Christina, laughing, “is to be able to get your marshmallow off the fork afterward!”

“If anyone knows that secret, tell me,” Carole said ruefully. She pulled at the black and gooey mess she’d created,
then gave it up and got another marshmallow to try for a more perfect one. The wind howled around the house and down the chimney. The fire flickered. “Brr!” Carole said, half to herself.

“Louise said you had a reason for visiting now, Carole,” Christina said. “It’s too bad you didn’t come in summer. The weather’s nice, and the lakes around here are so pretty.”

Carole explained about her family-tree project. “It’s not that I didn’t want to visit before,” she said, “but this was a good excuse at a good time, I guess, and Dad’s being awfully nice about it.” She smiled up at her father, who winked back.

“The project sounds interesting,” Christina said.

“I think it will be. Dad was telling me part of a story about a man who escaped slavery and came here to Minnesota.…” Carole looked around the room, hoping that one of her relatives could fill her in on the details. Uncle John nodded and seemed about to speak.

“That rascal Jackson Foley!” Grand Alice exclaimed. Carole looked at her in shocked surprise. Grand Alice had been dozing off but now was sitting forward in her chair, her eyes snapping. “You want to hear about him, do you?” she asked. Carole nodded. “Well, it’s a story, all right.” Grand Alice leaned back, crossed her hands in her lap, and began to speak. Everyone listened.

“My late husband’s great-grandfather was born into slavery
on a cotton plantation in the middle of Georgia. No one knows quite where it was—ol’ Jackson never told what his master’s name had been, and when he got away from there he didn’t bother to read the road signs on his way out. So we don’t know who owned him—owned, Carole, think on that—or where it was he was born. Master gave him the name Jackson Washington.

“He had a wife. He had three little babies, born one after another, scarcely a year apart. Then one day he had a chance to escape. The Underground Railroad. A train, so to speak, had come for him.” Grand Alice’s voice had a musical lilt to it, and Carole was so absorbed in listening that she could hardly move. She knew about the Underground Railroad—the secret network that had helped slaves to freedom.

“I don’t blame him for leaving,” Grand Alice continued. “I don’t blame him one bit. Think what it meant: freedom! The work he did would be his own—the money he earned, his own to spend. He could go where he pleased. He could name his own children, instead of having Master do it for him. And those children, growing up, could not be sold away from him. Freedom is a mighty and precious thing, but I don’t think any of us, here in this room, can understand what it must have meant to a person who was born a slave. So I say, I don’t blame ol’ Jackson for leaving.”

The fire cracked sharply. Carole jumped. Grand Alice paused, then went on. “His babies were too young to go—too
young to keep quiet during all those dark and dangerous nights of travel. His wife, they say, would not leave her children. But Jackson, he had to go. He promised her that he would come back for them, just as soon as he earned the money to buy their freedom.

“Well, word came back to them by that same Underground Railroad. Jackson had made it safe to the North. They heard he was in Boston. They heard he had a job, and was working hard. Then they heard nothing. A few years went by.

“The Civil War began. It became impossible to send messages between the North and the South. Finally the war ended, and the slaves were freed. Jackson Washington’s family didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to find him. They didn’t know if he was dead or alive. They thought he was dead, for sure. The children—two boys and a girl—were now eight, nine, and ten years old. With their mother, they set off north to find their daddy.”

Grand Alice licked her dry lips. “Get me some water, Louise, honey,” she said. Louise ran to the kitchen and came back with a tall glass. Grand Alice took several large swallows. “That’s better,” she said. “So. They went to Boston and found that Jackson had been there, but had moved on, so they moved on too. There were freedmen’s societies—blacks helping blacks find their families. Many families had been split apart by slavery. With the societies’ help, that woman and those children tracked Jackson Washington
from place to place. They looked for him for the better part of two years, working when they needed to, traveling when they could. They found him finally. I’m guessing that they wished they never did.”

Carole felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. What had Jackson done?

“Jackson was working for a logging company in a tiny town in Minnesota, on the Great Northern Railway line near the Mississippi River. Name of the town was Foley. Jackson, never much liking the name Washington, had changed his name to Foley too.

“He’d given the name Foley to his wife. And to their four children.”

There was dead silence in the room. Carole wasn’t sure she understood. “But his wife and children were looking for him,” she said.

“His first wife and children. His second wife and children were with him in Foley.” Grand Alice sighed. “I don’t blame him for leaving. I sure do blame him for never going back.”

Aunt Jessie spoke. Her dark eyes were angry. “You see, Carole, slave marriages weren’t legal. Legally, only Jackson Foley’s second wife was actually married to him.”

“But legally—what difference did legally mean?” Carole asked. She was horrified. “While they waited and waited for him, and tried so hard to find him, he’d just given them up?”

“He’d just given up,” Grand Alice said. “Apparently, he’d decided that he’d never be able to afford to buy his first family’s freedom, so he just started over. He didn’t know the war would come, of course. He didn’t know they’d all soon be free. But I say, he shouldn’t have given up.” She set her mouth in a firm line and folded and unfolded her hands.

“What happened next?” Christina asked.

“There was a ruckus that shook the streets of Foley. My husband’s grandfather was the eldest of the second batch of children—he was five years old—and he can remember the women shouting back and forth and the children crying. Finally, Jackson’s first wife and children renounced him and his lack of courage. They went back east to Boston. His second wife stayed on, but I don’t know if she forgave him. They’d had four children together already.” Grand Alice chuckled. “They never had another after that. But that’s where we come from, all of us Foleys.”

“What happened to the Washington family?” Carole asked.