The Purchase (25 page)

In the days that followed, Bett made her many remedies, and when the weather allowed, Mary brought them to the settlers who were taken sick in the cold, claiming them as her own. She collected modest fees from her customers and put the money aside with the thought of helping her father with his annual ten-dollar payment to the widow. She visited Mister Craig and Missus Emory and a boy named Rob, who was apprenticed to the blacksmith and was suffering a flux. She visited Silas Murray, who put the remedies into vials and set them on his counter – one for Cough and Sore Throat, another for any Itch or Eruption of the Skin, one for Fever of the Joints, and
one for Digestive Complaints and Unruly Bowels. People were glad to find remedies that did not require them to visit Doctor Howard, who was costly, and as Mary began to have followers who wanted consultations, she began to think she would be a midwife. She would learn Bett’s recipes. She would learn to fix a broken limb.

Daniel decided that in the spring, when the mill had walls and a roof, Ruth’s butter and Mary’s medicines would be sold there. He might sell cider, as well, and other supplies for travellers who stopped to grind grain. Grind once, sift once, he told Isaac, who was soon to find occupation at the mill. But Isaac’s thoughts wandered to the woods, where there were things to hunt, and to the blacksmith’s, where there were things to hear. He wanted to hunt not as his sister did with her snares and traps but with a gun. He wanted to hear from other boys and men about politics. He was fifteen that winter and while he cribbed the corn and cut firewood and mucked out the shed, he dreamed of grooves and bores and the buck he would shoot, as Wiley had done the winter before, with a single bullet.

By May, when the millstones arrived by oxcart, only Benjamin was there to watch the paddlewheel pull the river up and around and down again and in its turning make the millstones grind. Isaac had gone into town with Wiley Jones but Benjamin, with his mother’s fair hair and pale skin, with her patience and her practical mind, watched every move of Shoffert’s slave as he piled stone upon stone, building a room that would serve as a stopping place for travellers. He watched Floyd build the walls of this millhouse and then build a second floor so that when he carried the ground meal up a ladder he could spread it out with a rake to cool. Benjamin did not converse with Floyd but
stood off to one side under a newly greened oak and one day he looked up to see Bry dressed out in feathers balanced on a branch. The boy, who had never seen a black man before, was studying the slave the way a crow will study a raven.

As the dam began to hold and a little reservoir of water collected behind it, Bry came back every day. Wearing a torn cambric shirt decorated with feathers and bits of cloth, he resembled an exotic bird in a forest of leaves as he climbed up to study the man with his similar skin. His understanding of the world came from his two mothers and from seven-year-old Jemima. He had spent no time around men. Now he watched the slave’s movements and listened to his patterns of speech. When the big man laughed, Bry practised making the sound in his own small throat. When Floyd chopped, Bry watched his arms and hands. Floyd could stand in the rushing water as it rose around him until it reached the red scarf tied at his throat. Then, without blinking, he lifted his feet and lay on his back on top of the water like a dead fish, laughing, looking up, pointing a finger straight at the clouds.

When Bett and Mary came to the mill to grind corn, Bry saw that they were unequal in the eyes of the man he admired. He saw a difference between the two mothers and he saw that it widened or narrowed depending on who was speaking to them. He saw that Mary was more tolerant when he stole vegetables from Ruth’s garden. When Bett caught him at it, she stamped her foot and clapped her hands in his face. By the time the seedling on Joseph’s grave had grown from the seed Ruth had planted into a little tree, he had used the first fruits for his target practice, smiling when questioned by Mary and declaring that apples were like fingernails and would quickly grow back. She had laughed and patted him approvingly and in such ways as this, he found a confidence that was unusual in the son of a slave.

R
aising her child, Bett thought of the steadiness she had known in that kitchen where her grandmother had cooked and lived, sleeping behind the chimney with the grandchild left to her when her daughter was sold. She thought of her grandmother’s habits, her stories and instructions. Collect bur-duck seeds in late summer and store them dry. Take the roots in the fall of the first growing year. Plant when the moon is full. Dry pennyroyal in the shade; it promotes birthing early or late. Look for squaw vine near evergreen stumps. Pick a stem, never cut.

As her boy got older, she told him about this great-grandmother, taking him into the woods at night so he would learn to move quietly in the dark. She taught him to walk without making footprints and to read the direction from the moss on certain trees. She told him that one day they would walk away from this place and that knowledge would then be required of him. “There will come a time when you will have to think for yourself or for both of us.” Bett was a slave, but her child had no concept of any such thing and she was glad of that particular ignorance in him. Sometimes she told him stories of the mpemba, the land of the dead, where a sun rises and sets just as it does in the land of the living, and sometimes she spoke of a city that sits on the crest of a mountain, a city where each
clan has its own street and where his ancestors, called mbuki, healed the sick.

Her son passed these stories on to Jemima, for they were similar to the Bible stories she liked to hear from Mary whenever she could escape the watchful eyes of Ruth. Jemima was slow to read, but Bry invented a language made of simple shapes. He showed her where spirits nestle in the bark of trees and the sticky substance they leave. He showed her the carapace of a locust where a spirit had once been trapped for three days and said he could feel sound on his skin and he could close his eyes and step into a pool of water being lapped at by a wolf and then disappear down the wolf’s dark throat. Bry lived on the other side of things and she went wherever he went. He was five and she was eight. Then he was six and she was nine.

From Jemima, Bry learned to climb trees and swing from one to another on vines, for she was no more reserved than Isaac when it came to play. Jemima ran barefoot, climbed sticky pines in her long dress, and waded into the creek to catch trout and catfish on a sharpened stick. She packed corn cakes and the two of them set off with a make-believe map. When they found a cave on that furry hillside behind the lean-to, Jemima made rocks and stumps into furniture and cushioned them nicely with leaves.

One late summer day, with the field corn shucked, Ruth had boiled the toughest kernels in water and lye to get the husks off, and she took the iron pot outside, calling Jemima to drain off the water and skins. It was a warm day and Jemima was in the cave, where Bry was telling her an elaborate story about a place where everyone spoke a different language. In the distance, she heard Ruth call and she looked out at the sky to judge what was left of the light, hoping Ruth would not try to find her. Mama Ruth was hard to satisfy. Nothing Jemima did was ever quite right, and now the stepmother appeared at the cave’s entrance
and grabbed Jemima by the arm and brought her to the hominy pot that sat balanced on a rock and Jemima knocked it over with her foot.

“Well, that’s the Devil’s work,” said Ruth. “You know, Miss Jemima, the first time I kicked at this ground I started a garden and we been eatin of it ever since. Now you go on down to the crik and fill up that pot again.”

“I can’t carry that pot full a water, Mama Ruth. You know that.”

“I know the Devil is stronger than Jesus, is all I know.”

“Bry can help me.”

“You leave him be. You’re too big to be with such as he.”

“But my sister told me to look after him.”

“Well I am your mama, and I say nix to that.”

“You are not my mama!” Jemima shouted, leaving the overturned pot and the hominy on the grass and running fast back to the cave. She could hear Ruth’s protests and became somewhat afraid, but in the dark of the cave, she found a message written in the secret language scratched in the dirt:
,
Find Me
. Turning fast, she saw that there were clues strung out from the door of the cave, across the meadow, and on to the creek. First, a picture drawn in the dirt. Stick figures – a boy in pants and a girl in a ruffled skirt. Next, a leaf wrapped around a stone because Bry always left that sign. It was his signature. It might mean that he had climbed up a tree to watch her hunt for him. He claimed he could walk a mile without ever touching ground. Or it might mean only that she was on the right trail. Trees swallowed her. A stick broken into a cross. She could hear Ruth yelling, but she would not turn back and went deeper into the forest. Ruth had told her that the real cross was made of pine and that’s why a pine tree always bled. “You come on out, Bry, right now this minute!” Jemima commanded, stamping her
foot. She did not like this game. It made her feel all alone and she made a mark on a fat pine to see if it would bleed. Then she sat on the ground and built a village of twigs by snapping them into pieces. She thought of the cross Bry had made and knew she wouldn’t be able to find it again. She was lost. She made nightshirts for the stick people out of leaves and stretched out next to them. Bry would find her and make up a story. There would be a hero. There would be a queen. Jemima rolled over to look at the sky and tried not to be afraid.

When Bry found the spot where she had stopped to examine his stick figures, he knew how long she had stood there by the mark of bare feet in the grass. When he got to the timber lot, he called her name because he knew that she wasn’t close to finding him. When she didn’t answer, he climbed into a hickory tree and looked down to see her lying asleep. Her head was on the tiniest of houses and she had an arm flung out with a stick person in her grasp. She lay like that with her face to the sky and he came down from the tree and lay beside her, touching her face and tracing his name on her skin.

O
ne day Bry followed Isaac into the shed, holding to the dark edges and staying out of sight while Isaac put feed in a trough and laughed as one of the sows pushed a piglet away. “If you ever want to help, you’d be welcome,” Isaac said quietly to the hiding boy. He stroked the piglet’s bristly back. “Two of these pigs were raised up by your pa before he died.”

Bry looked at him, wide-eyed.

“You ever see where he was killed?”

“My pa? Sure I did.” It wasn’t true. Bry knew nothing of this.

“It’s only a tree,” Isaac said. “But maybe you should see it.”

“A tree,” Bry repeated.

“It’s special. There are offerings put there.” Isaac had found it for himself when Wiley refused to take him. Isaac said the tree had a collection of little things – a wooden whistle, a handkerchief, a penny from the island of Jamaica, a rolled-up tobacco leaf.

Bry did not know what an offering was, but the next day he agreed to be taken from the only place he had ever been to a huge tree that stood a good hour’s walk away. Isaac took him by way of the creek and then north to the Shoffert boundary, and Bry followed nervously in Isaac’s wake, for he admired the older boy. “It’s a ways still,” Isaac called back when Bry seemed to lag, “but I know these woods all right.”