The Purchase (22 page)

PART 2
 

R
uth called her child John, for the Baptist, and fed him a mixture of blood and cream until she could no longer lift him. Had anyone seen a child smile in its second month or laugh in its third? Had any baby such muscled legs, such a firm grip, such unswerving eyes? How was anyone to dispute her claims? Little John was swaddled so tightly that, according to Missus Dougherty, he looked more papoose than Christian. “It be the way to raise them straight,” Ruth asserted, for she had seen it at the almshouse, where they hung the orphans on hooks in their swaddling clothes to straighten their spines.

Daniel’s relations with Ruth had hardly changed. He was quiet with her, even taciturn except in the dark of night, when he was undone by her heat next to him. Together they had made a child who did not resemble his others in the least. John was dark-haired, robust, and pink-skinned from the Virginia air he breathed, although that breathing seemed to steal the air from Joseph. “This one, especially,” Rebecca had said on her deathbed, instructing Daniel to care for her fragile newborn above all the rest. But Joseph’s smile was vanishing; his laugh was a disappearing note. He lay on his cot by the fire, watching people come and go without joy or complaint, as if he had given up the last tiny shred of will. Seeing the pale face, the large eyes, Daniel remembered a moment at the slave auction when he had
thought of this child for no reason. He had looked up at a boy on the auctioneer’s stage and thought of small Joseph, even then wondering why his own child’s face had appeared to him. Had it been a warning?

Bett was not welcome in Ruth’s one-room house, but Mary brought tonics to the door for Joseph, and Ruth called them slave hoodoo and threw them away, saying she would not have such potions near her own baby boy, saying Joseph only needed blood and cream and an extra bit of rabbit stew, if he would but eat. Ruth was absorbed in the antics of her own child and in negotiations with her customers and in feeding the family and making butter.

Daniel was preparing for the spring planting. That March of 1802, Frederick Jones had bought a team of oxen and in April he loaned them to Daniel so he could break up the virgin soil on ten acres of the land bought from Michael Shoffert. Since the murder of Simus, the whole acreage had been neglected. Daniel could not look again at the locust tree, but he kept to a corner of the acreage and did not explore farther. Frederick Jones said that, with oxen, a plow could cut furrows five inches deep, throwing a ribbon of grassy sod on the side and laying another ribbon of soil on top when seed corn had been dropped. He said Benjamin was old enough now, at seven, to walk behind the plow dropping seeds. Then for the next three months it would be a contest between weeds and moles and Daniel as to which would win.

It was the custom to plow a corn field three or four times and Daniel recited Virgil as he fought the unturned ground.
Before Jupiter’s time no farmers worked the land …

By June there was a worthy crop of hay for the livestock and the evil spell that had hung over the Shoffert land seemed almost to be lifted as if, after wind and storm, the weather had
finally cleared. But long before Daniel had purchased his first six acres, Cherokee had built villages on the riverbanks of southwestern Virginia and Kentucky and farmed the low-lying fields. They had fought the Shawnee, who built their own villages until Napoleon bought their territory. And now a Shawnee from the north named Tecumseh was trying to stir up the tribes. The British were said to be arming his followers, and the people of Jonesville crowded into Silas Murray’s store to read the
Weekly Bulletin
that came from Petersburg. Rumours were exchanged, and tension began to build.

The two sycamores grew taller. The children grew taller and found shelter in the one sycamore with a hole at its heart. The corn ripened according to its ancient, internal clock, and by late June, when the high stalks cut off the breeze, Daniel was wet with his own heat when he came in for his noon meal. Little John had pushed out of his carapace of linen and spread his wings, doing his best to follow Jemima wherever she went. And as Ruth’s child grew and strengthened, Rebecca’s lastborn withered. It seemed that one thing caused the other, and Daniel could not love little John. He hovered over Joseph, more and more attached.
This one especially
, Rebecca had said, and Daniel remembered the eyes grown large in her frightened face and he did love Joseph especially and yet he could not make him well.

In the lengthening evenings of fall, when the family and animals had been fed, Daniel sat with the children in front of his fireplace, cracking and eating the meat of walnuts and hickories. This was the hour for reading, when Joseph leaned against him, taking short, laboured breaths.
Father Aeneas now was mulling mighty cares this way and that within his breast: whether to settle in the fields of Sicily, forgetful of the fates, or else to try
for the Italian coast … 
. But the firelight was dim, and Daniel, exhausted by his work in the field, sometimes dropped the book and put his head back and closed his eyes, only to think of things he did not want to think of or to see unwanted pictures behind his eyelids. Then he would pinch himself and sit up to read again.

Once, on a cold night, he opened his eyes with a terrible groan and slouched to the door as if he’d been ordered outside. He stayed out in the night for a long time while Ruth worried and the children wondered and when he came back he was rolling a great log of hickory. He told the children that he had walked over the tracks of a bear on his way to the woodpile and had then gone down to the timber lot to check on the pigs. The log was green and so large that Isaac had to help Daniel get it into the fireplace, where it quickly burst into flame. As Benjamin and Jemima came close to watch, a sweet sap began to ooze out of the log and Ruth brought a spoon and the children took turns coating it with the sticky treat. Isaac and Benjamin had been busy that day husking corn and cribbing it and now they made a game out of shaping the sap into balls that could be rubbed into each other’s hair while Jemima fed sap to the doll Simus had made for her, that innocent creature of the blind oak race.

Then real winter descended. The cold was harder that year than anyone in Lee County could remember. “North wind,” muttered Ruth when Joseph developed a cough. Bett made a willow tonic that Mary brought into the house, but Ruth sniffed at the unstoppered gourd and poured its contents into the snow.

“I have given this same tonic to the pastor for his cough.” Mary’s usual quiet voice was hard and sour.

“And you told him you were the maker of it or he would never have swallowed it down.” Ruth loomed in the doorway, blocking it. “You give our neighbours false hope along with
falsehoods! Go find Joseph a sourwood tree and bore a hole just over his head. Now then, just listen. If you but put a piece of his hair in that hole he’ll be cured the day he grows past it.”

Mary reported Ruth’s prescription to Daniel. “My little brother is sick and she wants to put his hair in a tree!”

But Daniel only smiled weakly. He had smiled at Ruth too, when he heard her idea. Perhaps there was no connection between nature and reason. It might be that every human success simply required faith. He had begun to believe that Joseph was suffering from the sins of a father who had lost his way. But which sins? He looked at his precious four-year-old in the narrow fireside cot. Rebecca had given her life for this child. He remembered the tiny head in its white linen cap and her pale hand resting so lightly on it. He made himself think of Rebecca as he sat staring at the pattern of the flames in the stone fireplace and he wondered then whether God was a fiction, an understandable human wish. He remembered the words of the widow Fox:
What good is praying after what the Lord done me?
He had thought her words heresy, but what if the widow was right?

The Catechism asked whether he who has received grace might have ground to fear, and Daniel knew the answer well enough.
I must keep under my body and bring it into subjection
. But how to do that with a young, ardent wife? Was doctrine more important than experience? He had tossed and turned in the darkness of the loft where he slept with his sons and finally descended the ladder. Now he could not climb that ladder again. He had bedded Ruth Boyd and created a child, convincing himself that there was love in the act. But what if his sin consisted of submitting to lust? Did he love Ruth Boyd?

Unless his sin consisted of something else. He had traded a horse to acquire a human being. From that trade had come
two deaths. Daniel sat with his feverish child and thought there wasn’t enough air in the world when he listened to him cough. Only two days before, he had counted the eighty-six dollars he’d managed to save. Most of it came from Ruth’s butter. A little came from the sale of seed corn and fodder. Forty-six dollars. Ten would soon go to the widow for Bett. How could he ever take back his horse?

“Wiley Jones once went to a doctor in Rosehill,” Mary announced the next day, even as she blushed at the mention of this name. She had come to the door with rendered lard from a possum she’d managed to snare and kill.

Daniel replied that doctors were dangerous enough in Pennsylvania, where some of them had actually studied medicine. “Not one of them could save your mother,” he noted, half to himself. “We must pray for guidance, Mary Amelia. In this, I could use your help.”

“Rosehill is not far,” Mary said, although she had never been there. She saw that her father was as much Quaker as he had ever been.

Daniel next said that it was too far to take a sick child in such inclement weather. He said doctors were costly and rarely did anything but put cups and leeches on helpless patients. “Warm weather will clear up his cough,” he insisted. And, indeed, there was a respite in early March just as some of the birds gone for the cold season began to come back. For a week or two, Joseph seemed better. Things were returning to normal with Daniel walking his fields and planning his crops while Ruth spent five dollars to buy a second cow and two mallard ducks.

Then suddenly Joseph worsened and Mary again made her plea. “He is too pale,” she said. “His eyes fill up his entire face.”

Joseph lay on his cot without taking much notice of them and Daniel decided the time had perhaps come to reconsider.
“The doctor’s name is Mister Howard,” Mary said as they stood looking down at the sickly boy.

Daniel listened to Joseph cough. He heard his daughter’s advice and the sound of his own guilty heart, which beat on and on without his volition. At last, he told Isaac to bring the wagon round to the door of the house, so that Joseph could be carried out, wrapped in Mary’s quilt.

Daniel had in his pocket the money he’d saved. Next to him, Mary was holding Joseph as if he might break. The child was coughing and Daniel took up the reins and the sun came out from behind a cloud and the landscape brightened. Birds chattered. The coins jingled in Daniel’s pocket and Mulberry’s hooves marked out a rhythm on the road to Rosehill. Clump clump … clump clump … 
horse for … a boy
. Daniel listened. He leaned forward and shivered and then sat up straight. The truth of it drummed in his head. He dropped the reins and put his hands over his ears, but the racket persisted … 
Horse for … a boy …
as Mulberry plodded dutifully along a road surrounded by trees and more trees, their branches squeezing. Mary held Joseph, nuzzling him with her cheek against his. He remembered the long ride with Simus taken behind this horse in this wagon on a day like this. The trees were the same and the sky and the scent of the roadside grass. Here, by this outcrop of rock, he had said,
Do you want to ride up here with me?
and Mulberry had been plodding … 
Do you build? Do you want to ride up here? Won’t you come along with me?

At a crossroads ahead, he could see a large rock that resembled a bird of prey. He could hear the words of the auctioneer:
The road to my place is marked out by old Eagle Rock when you come ta redeem
. Daniel grabbed at the reins, tugging hard to stop Mulberry’s plodding pace.