The Purchase (23 page)

Joseph opened his eyes.

Mary said, “Why are we stopped?”

Daniel stepped out of the wagon and stood looking up the road that met theirs. Lord, if I make this right … He could not kneel in front of his daughter to bargain with God, so he stood with both hands pressed against his chest. Mulberry blew out her breath, then a great silence fell upon horse and birds and small creatures while they all waited. A red-tailed hawk slowly circled overhead.

When he climbed back in the wagon, he looked at his son in Mary’s arms and turned the horse up the road to his left. “This should not take long.”

The road meandered along, making twists and turns until it petered out to a trace that led into a scabrous valley, bleak and apparently uninhabited. But there behind trees, as if called from a dream, sat the auctioneer’s house, shades drawn down, unwelcoming. A three-legged cat skittered under the porch. As they rocked to a halt, Mary grabbed Daniel’s arm.

Mulberry lifted her muzzle and whinnied.

In the nearby field, there was aggrieved horse response.

Mulberry lurched forward then, yanking the wagon across barren ground until she was stopped by a snaking fence. Beyond it stood Miss Patch, weathered and wound down. Daniel said, “A moment here, please, Mary.”

Mary clung to her brother as her father ran toward the desolate pasture. He did not feel himself climb the fence and he was sure he could not be looking at his much altered, much offended mare. Even so, he crossed the field making sounds in his throat as if answering some injury. “Good lady,” he said to her then, as he always had in the past.

From the other side of the fence came a shrill cry, and Daniel turned as Mary began her useless pilgrimage, carrying Joseph to the auctioneer’s crooked porch. There was the sound of her
hand banging on the door and her shouted request for water, for mercy, for help. Then the door opened and she pointed her chin in the direction of the pasture, as if the horse and not the child might explain her need. But the auctioneer looked down at the boy and shook his head, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his sleeve.

Afterward, Daniel watched Miss Patch plod alongside the wagon, lifting her head to smell her release. All around was nature in its exuberance without meaning. He brought his child home and laid him out on the puncheon table he himself had made. He washed him with water and soap – a soft cloth between fingers and toes, behind the ears, inside the nose, around the fragile testicles, as if warmth and cleanliness could ever comfort him again.

Daniel’s bargain with God. He had been four years in Virginia and now there was nothing left to argue against or resist. By evening, he was pushing a spade into its dirt. When the spade hit a stone, the hollow sound seemed to come from his heart. Why enliven the souls of children, only to watch them perish? “I will make no more daughters, or sons,” he said to the Lord. “I curse Thy enterprise, which may not be senseless but the sense of which now eludes me.”

In later years he would wander out to his shed, a building to harbour his two horses – one of them given back freely by the auctioneer – Ruth’s three cows, and a fine group of pigs. And there he would sometimes find Ruth’s little John with his half-brother, Isaac. “Go back to your studies,” he would say to the child whose very existence wounded him. And he would then
chide himself for his steel closed heart and wish that Ruth had not come to his house in Brandywine and that she had never stayed. “I planted an apple seed there,” she had told him, pointing at Joseph’s unmarked grave. She had also said, “To bring forth fruit,” but Daniel had told her that his sin lay not in the purchase of a boy for the trade of a horse but in the unholy lust he had once felt for her.

M
ary kept to herself, avoiding everyone but Bett. Without daily lessons to attend, Benjamin got up to mischief of one sort or another while Isaac went off to the woods with Frederick’s son, Wiley Jones. Older than Isaac by five years, Wiley was teaching him how to hunt squirrel. The two of them sometimes surprised Ruth with an offering for the iron pot and Isaac, forbidden by Daniel to touch Wiley’s gun, had learned how to skin the animals and preserve the pelts.

Jemima, old enough now to help Ruth in the house, wandered out to the lean-to, where she could be close to Bett’s child, teaching him nursery rhymes and counting games and ignoring Joseph’s cot that sat empty by the fireplace.

Mary spent her time stretched out on the lean-to bed counting again. First Jester Fox came upon us, she told herself. After me walking down to see Simus in my indigo dress. After dropping my old dress on the floor that Simus made. After being told to watch the children because a pig was to be killed.
And one of them shall not fall without your Father … 
. Fathers could not be counted on.

It was Bett’s child who kept Mary breathing as she counted back. She counted as she rocked him in her arms. She counted as she fed him his first corn cake. She counted as she taught him to spell his own name: B-R-Y. She counted as she lay by his side trying to sleep.

One night Bett woke her from a nightmare. “Come out and walk with me,” she said, pulling Mary’s arm. “I’ll show you where the seng roots hide so that when you’re an old woman, you can be out in the woods leaning on your cane, all bent over collecting them, getting wealthy and fat.”

Mary rolled over and smiled in half sleep. “We will be picking them together,” she said, smoothing her hair back and rubbing at her face. For two years and more they had lived as sisters, raising Bett’s child, and she had been comforted by the feel of Bett’s hand on her arm and the sound of her soft, low voice. She no longer walked in the woods and she did not want to leave the lean-to now, in the middle of the night. The crack of a branch, the cry of an animal … But she got off the bed dutifully and reached for her cape as Bett took her hard by the arm and did not let her pull away even as they went past the meadow and down to the dreaded timber lot. It was long past midnight and the mosquitoes were thick and Bry had to be covered with a blanket as Bett carried him on her back. Swatting at mosquitoes, stepping through the underbrush, Mary unbraided her hair. “The nippers are going after me.” She slapped at her face.

“You should forgive your father, Mary.”

“Will the nippers stop biting me then?”

“Perhaps they will. Your father is grieving, as you are. And just look over there.” Bett was pointing at a dark mess of growth. “This is where they hide. Do you see? It’s easiest in the moonlight, finding the seng roots under their shiny leaves. Remember that when I am no longer with you.”

“Whatever does that mean?”

Bett was digging at a root, using a small knife she carried in her bag. “You can come with me if you don’t marry.”

“Who would I marry in this sorry place? Come
where
with you?”

“I saw you staring at Wiley Jones.”

“I do not stare. It’s impolite. And you can’t leave me.” Mary felt small and cold.

“And Wiley Jones was staring back at you. He is not what you think.” Bett continued to dig. “When Bry is old enough, I will take him north.”

“You must never try to escape or they will catch you and do what they did to Simus!” How could she live without Bett?

Bett shouldered her bag, saying nothing.

The two girls, ghostly in the dark, climbed up the slope that rose behind the lean-to, a furry hill dense with thickets and a hooting owl.

When Mary tried again to teach her brothers geography or history, Isaac soon lost interest and ran off to be with Wiley Jones while Benjamin became distracted, idly shredding the leaves of Bett’s collected plants. It was Bry who listened attentively.
What great bay lies in the northern part of North America? What large river from the east flows into the Mississippi?
Isaac and Benjamin didn’t care, but Bry studied Mary’s book as if he could already read them, causing Bett to laugh and say it was against the law to teach a slave.
Mountains, where are they? Rivers, where do they rise? Lakes, what are their outlets?
Bry listened while Mary protested that it was none of her doing, that Bry was a word thief, and for a few minutes or an hour the air would clear and there would be light enough to lift their spirits, for they were only two girls sharing a tiny space with a child to hold and feed and keep happy and clean and during the nighttime wandering of Bett, Mary lay next to that child, running her fingers over the bones of his dear, sleeping face.

“M
ister Craig is suffering a complaint,” Missus Dougherty whispered to Ruth after Prayer Meeting one Sunday, “and asks would you bring along Mary when you come for their cream. I gave him a bit of her tonic and he seemed to benefit …” Missus Dougherty had taken Mary’s tonic for an irritation of the bladder. She had given Mary a small coin in return, along with her thanks. “The Quaker folk have something special about them,” she said, half to herself, adding that the efficacy of Mary’s tonic might have had something to do with the holy water of the creek, which Mary said was an ingredient.

“Mary is no doctor,” Ruth retorted, feeling diminished in her role with the butter churn, “and these days she does not go out.”

Missus Dougherty said Mary was of course grieving for her brother, which was understandable, but it had gone on long enough and would be mended by usefulness.

But Mary’s grieving looked more like blaming to Ruth. Blaming Daniel for Joseph’s death, although Joseph had seemed ready to die from the very day Ruth had come to the house in Brandywine, where he barely took the breast his mother offered and then spit up what he swallowed. Ruth thought once more of the weaklings at the almshouse. It was Mary who had
begged her father to take the sick child out on a cold March morning to see a medical man when poor Joseph should have been left in his cot. What good in the world are cups and leeches to a sickly child? Now it was Daniel who grieved and Daniel who wept when he thought no one could hear. Ruth had little John balanced on her hip and when she pinched his leg, he let out a healthy wail. Well, then. Her boy was strong and fit. Ruth tugged at her hat and put a protective arm around little John as she nodded to Missus Dougherty and decided that one Dickinson in the healing business was certainly enough.

As the wagon drew up, she pushed John up over the wheel, which was warm to the touch from an hour in the sun – an hour of listening to the pastor preach about land stolen from the Red Indian, only he said it wasn’t stolen because they had never made any claim to it. The Jonesville men should be arming themselves, the pastor had warned.

The sky was noisy with cranes and geese. Their squawking and honking made a racket overhead, and the roadside trees tossed as if all those wings above had raised a wind. It was going to be a hard winter according to Mister Jones, who made his forecast based on the thickness of his sheep’s grey wool. Ruth looked at the brittle landscape and tried to forget about Mary and her potions, but Daniel was clearing his throat, readying himself for an announcement. “Ida Dougherty wants to see our Mary out doctoring,” he announced and scratched at the beard he was growing. “I wonder if she hopes to heal Mary or Hiram Craig.”

“So Missus Dougherty would have Mary sitting by a man’s bed?” To show her disapproval, Ruth narrowed her mouth and gave her full attention to a prairie chicken that had fluttered up from the field, its feathers the same muted colour as the grass. “But the pastor says times are dangerous and girls should stay home.”

“Mary is eighteen. She needs occupation.” Daniel snapped the reins, finding Ruth’s admiration for the pastor more irritating than usual today, when the tedious sermon had been used to frighten his neighbours into taking up arms. The president had quietly paid some millions of dollars to Bonaparte, thereby purchasing half of North America and aiding the French in their war against the British. Americans would be caught in the middle. It was no time for a minister of the cloth to be pugilant. Daniel had spent the hour of that unreasoning sermon thinking about Isaac, who, at fourteen, was spending far too much time with Wiley Jones. With such a one as inspiration, Isaac might want to join any available fight. Occupation. It was the only answer for his children. Now, during a long, meditative ride home, a vision came to him – the vision of a paddlewheel turning in Sawmill Creek.