The Purchase (20 page)

Daniel saw that she had thought all this out long before his arrival and he stood with his arms at his sides, bested by her logic. A long, hard year it had been, a breaking year, and he possessed at that moment only fifteen dollars. But if Ruth had been the making of the three silver coins he held … well, she belonged to him as did the cow, Tick, and the milk and the creek and the money was therefore his. But he felt uneasy, for there was Miss Patch to consider. Twice more he had seen his mare pulling heavy loads to the mill at Swift Current. Once he had spoken softly and once he had not, since at that sighting he saw sores along her flank and spent the minutes as she passed wiping his eyes to clear them.

When a little girl rounded the corner wrapped in a blanket to ward off the cold, he touched his hat superstitiously. The child had an eye that was crossed and she sucked on her thumb for nourishment. There were brown weeds between the boards of the porch where he stood and where, a few months before, he had received the blow that had sent him reeling. “I will make no promise about an unborn child,” he said. “But I will pay for the girl as I can over time. She will belong to you until I can guarantee her freedom with a final payment.” He took a step closer and levelled his gaze. “In return, you will keep your sons off my land or I will report the murder.”

Daniel put his three coins into the widow’s hand and she put them to her nose and sniffed before turning to go into her house, leaving the child regarding Daniel with that crooked eye.

Riding Mulberry up to this house, he had been surprised that the hill was not steeper, but riding back down, he stroked the
mare’s dark neck and thought only of the widow’s bitterness against the Lord.
What good is praying after what the Lord done me?
Prayer was a matter of listening, not asking. Prayer was an opening of the heart in order to find right wisdom and action. When his wife died, he’d blamed the doctor, not the Lord. Disowned by his community in Brandywine, he’d decided to pack up his children and go where he might find tolerance. He had driven past the wealthy plantations crowning the hilltops of Tidewater Virginia, moving west to the rugged hand-hewn cabins of the valleys, sure that his character would adapt to the new landscape. He thought now that he should never have wished for such a thing.

M
ary told Bett that she was safe now but that she must stay hidden on the Dickinson land. “The widow will look the other way as long as you stay out of her path and don’t tempt her sons to mischief.”

After that, she began to bring the boys out to the lean-to every morning, calling it The Schoolroom, so that they would attend to her with all seriousness. She found that teaching her brothers excused her from working with Ruth and gave her reason to stay close to Bett.

At first she tried to teach the Catechism.
Does he who has found grace have reason to fear?
The questions and responses were taught to all Quaker children at an early age. But Isaac and Benjamin became restless, and, after all, what use were such questions in Lee County, Virginia, where people were hung in trees? Better to go back to the
Aeneid
, which catalogued a darker, truer world. Mary again asked her father for this, his most precious possession, as she desired to read rather than recite its contents, and he put down the bowl of mortar he was mixing and told her to take the words in their scrolled leather cover back to the lean-to as if it were his heart she carried.

I sing of arms and the man
. She ran her eyes down the page. Her mind chattered.
Why could I not have fallen at your hand … 
. Her head ached and she took the book back to her
father and brought out her old
Manual of Geography Combined with History and Astronomy
, saying to the boys, “Papa will not let you stay in Virginia if you do not do your sums and learn geography.” In what direction from Asia is Europe? From Europe is Africa? In what direction from Hindoostan are the Japan Islands? How would you go by water from Nova Zembla to Cape of Good Hope? Here was comfort. She made the boys draw maps on the slate with wet fingers: circles and squares. How many sides to a circle? She had only paper enough for her letters home. A circle is infinite. Dear Grandmother Grube … Dear Taylor Corbett … What people did Columbus find in America? Answer: Savages, who obtained their food by hunting and fishing. What people from Europe came to America? Answer: The Spaniards, the English, and, after them, the French. Where did the Blacks or Negroes come from? Answer: They were brought from Africa as slaves to the Whites. Mary glanced at Bett, who was quietly humming, pouring something into a hollowed-out gourd.

The new century arrived, as if the world might really change and the dead reappear. 1800. The chimney was at last complete. The sky cleared. The creek began its trickle over thinning ice. Bears woke and wandered hungrily. Birds flew from one place to another, searching for places to nest. Ruth went down to the creek with the cream she had brought from her customers, passing the lean-to where Bett now lived. She no longer asked when Bett would be leaving. She had given that up the day Daniel went to the widow with her dearly saved cash, spending it for a girl who was only another mouth to feed. Bett did not milk the cow or wrap butter in packets or work the earth.
She thought she was someone special, and now Mary kept her company, passing by Ruth as if she did not exist. Once Ruth had seen the girls holding hands and yelled out, “Which one of you is blind?”

One day in late April, Bett led Mary to the door of the lean-to and said, “This is my time.”

Time?

At the sound of the latch being set – a scraping of metal on wood – Mary thought of the stone at the door of Christ’s tomb. She put her ear to the splintery wood and heard Bett at her vegetal work in the dark, lighting a fire and pouring water into her iron pot, and she remembered her mother screaming behind a different door in Brandywine, after which nothing was ever the same: no more reading in front of the fireplace with its big cooking pot, no more skipping to the Academy, where Taylor Corbett sat on a bench with Isaac and she sat with his sister, Caroline. Could she have guessed that her mother would never again brush her straight hair, remarking that it must have come from her father’s side of the family? She heard Bett whimper and thought of the tomb and of Jesus, and of Simus, who had died for her, and it was all bound together, for this was his child.

It was a morning of hush, of no singing birds, of no children’s cries. Bett thought of the Fox place, where there was always the thundering of boots and slamming of doors and the two little girls laughing and shouting. Perhaps they had thought it fitting that she move out of the nursery to a hut when her
grandmother died. Perhaps what happened to Bett was of no interest to those little girls as long as she could tend to their every need. Bett could, after all, take herself out a pitcher of water to clean her hands. She could do her business behind a bush, as she would not notice such inconvenience any more than a dog would notice it. While Bett thought of these things and the first deep contractions hit, a new anger bloomed in her. It was directed at Missus Fox, who had not wanted to see that Bett was visited in that hut, a fact she would never admit. She did not blame the workers who were kept down by the field in their quarters. They had no way of protecting her. Once they crawled into their cabins at night, they ate their mush and went to sleep, as was their right. Their lives were harder than hers, or so they must have thought, but she had once lived in a house at that Tidewater place, had once spoken with trust to her mistress there, had once taken Saturday baths in the kitchen and the next morning listened to her grandmother speak of the African gods while the white family went to church. Now Bett spread her red cloth on the dirt floor and walked round and round it to measure the circumference of pain that was to come. What had Onesimus suffered on the locust tree? What would she suffer compared to it? She remembered her grandmother’s husky voice calling on Nana Buruku, who managed birth and death. She remembered that at the rising and setting of the sun, the living and the dead exchange day and night, so she squatted and crossed her arms to call her grandmother back, but the light, slanting between logs, the warm air, and the smell of the ground brought back instead the way she had previously lived behind her master’s house. She remembered the times Rafe Fox had come to her hut and pissed against it while she lay under his father. She remembered the weight of that man and the smell of the piss and the jabbing pain and how Eb also cornered her and grabbed
her although not while her grandmother lived. She sipped very slowly at the concoction she’d brewed – lobelia, squaw vine – and felt better until it was worse and then it became unbearable. Had not her mother and her grandmother endured this? Had not every woman before her endured it including the first mother, who was some colour or no colour, some hue, some belonger to some race, who was the mother of all those mothers who came after? And what crime had those mothers committed except by relationship? She pulled her medicine bag close, took out the chalk she kept hidden there, and crawled onto her knees to draw a white cross on the red cloth, dividing the world of the dead from the living. Between the astonishing vise-squeeze of contractions, she squatted low and made herself drink, made herself breathe, made herself think of the creature inside her, troubled in its ground, turning and bursting, tearing her flesh. She talked to herself,
Ancient Father, Sovereign one, Dark stone coming down
, but remembered Mary’s raised hand and again, not hearing herself, begged the seed to assume its form, drinking more of the tea her grandmother had taught her to make.

That old woman had been brought over in a ship, curled up, nearly starved, surely raped. That old woman had landed in Cuba before coming to Charleston on another ship and, having come to an enlightened Virginia house, taught herself the words in the cookery book so she could sleep indoors, civilized. That old woman was known as Molasses and what was her name in fact? Bett didn’t know; Bett was never told. Bett knew only her grandmother’s hands and arms, voice and face. Healer. Known far and wide. Who am I, then? Only the grandspawn of a woman called Molasses. She thought of the other one she had loved, Onesimus, who had been more alone than even she had been and who would, from this day, be her child’s father since she willed it that way.