The Purchase (29 page)

The Fox boys buried their mother behind the house and drove a wagon up the road a few hours later. They wore sombre faces as the horse pulled the wagon under branches that showed the first hints of spring: twigs so pink they might have been full of blood, small birds jumping and singing. “Say there!” Rafe shouted as he steered horse and wagon onto the ground in front of Wiley’s house, where a sweet smell leaked out of the chimney. He poked at his sleepy brother with an elbow. They were about to acquire a strong growing boy for hard field work. He
closed his eyes and counted the spots inside his eyelids, waiting for Wiley to emerge, but when he opened them, there was only a boy standing on the porch. “Our ma’s passed,” Rafe said as if the child might expect some explanation for what was about to take place. Bry was winding a piece of string around his fingers and Rafe figured him to be nine or ten, remembering the girl whose hut he had pissed against, sometimes with Wiley for company. He had watched his father visit the hut every night. He had watched and counted the minutes because he was curious. Then he had stopped counting and the girl had run away and his father had been killed and here he was as Wiley came out of his new-built house while Eb sat on the wagon seat half asleep, full of drink.

Rubbing his leg with the butt of his whip, he said, “We come for the boy, Wiley,” and lifted his shoulders in a shrug.

Wiley looked at Bry. “You go on inside.”

But Bry stood stock still.

“See here,” Rafe blurted. “You have no rights and we’ve got a cotton crop to get in the ground.” He had his eyes on Wiley’s boots again.

“Could be you do.” Wiley rubbed his forehead with a finger, as if he had found a source of pain. “But you won’t grow enough cotton in these parts to pay for so much as one little boy.”

“We wasn’t talking of payin.” Eb sucked on his cheek, now somewhat awake. “You best hand him over to us now less you got funds at your disposal to buy what your wife gets for free.” He laughed in the gutter of his throat. “Our ma’s passed and we want him back.”

Wiley stretched his fingers, flexing them. “You can’t take him
back
to a place he has never been.”

There was a moment of nothing. Then Eb said, “Wiley, you start to aggravate me. But let’s us each and all remember what
we once shared in.” He cleared his throat noisily. When he spat, his aim was legendary and he spat often, even between sentences, but just now he held back. He was a year older than Rafe and Wiley with a mouth full of yellow teeth.

Wiley lifted his voice. “Mary! Will you come on out here!”

There were footsteps, the fast click of her boots, then Mary stood at the open door. She raised her eyes to search her husband’s face.

“They want Bry,” Wiley told her.

She reached out fast and pulled Bry against her racing heart. “You cannot take him. He is mine.”

Eb unfurled his fingers, as if counting regrets. “That is not the true case, ma’am, though we never did come to collect until our ma passed as she had no fondness of him.”

Mary let go of Bry’s shoulders and reached up, feeling for the rifle that hung over the door. Long ago she had seen it held by a boy with straw-coloured hair and a scarf on his face. The boy had pointed this gun at her father and then dragged Simus away. Boy turned to man, she thought, and she stared at her husband as the old picture came to her, that third rider on his fire-breathing horse. She dropped her arms and bolted past the men without looking back. She might have run to her father, but what could she say to him? Blame and more blame. Instead she ran to find Bett, who had told her that men determine everything. She ran past her father’s house and on a half-mile to the mill, losing her breath, remembering the first time she had run for Bett – how young and strong she had been, how strong and quick.

From a distance, Bett heard a cry of such anguish that she put down the bowl she was holding, now meaningless, and looked out through the trees toward the distant house where she lived in two cellar rooms with her boy. For herself, at that moment, she cared nothing, not a whit, and she ran to Mary, wiping her face on her apron and untying its strings.

T
he creatures Bry found huddled around a fire in the drafty slave quarters barely looked up. One of them moved a stick in a pot that sat on rocks and another lay sleeping or dead. From a corner, two boys glanced at Bry with indifference until the female, still stirring, curled a finger at him. The dirt floor was wet and Bry lifted his boots as if they had never touched mud. He had lost his childhood, although he could feel it on his skin. Why was he being punished? What had he done? He took note of the faces, the clothes, the sleeping planks. Savages stirring and eating mush. There was wind and rain and he lay on damp straw in astonished confusion. Why was he there? If I run, they will come after me, he told himself, pressing his fingernails into his palms. He remembered the story of his father hanging on a tree. He thought of the old man he had found in the forest. He had walked for a while with that man; he had drunk from his bent canteen. He had led him between friendly trees and taken him all the way to the mill, where Floyd had cut the chains from his wrists. With that thought, Bry knew an hour or two of wet, cold sleep before a horn blew in the dark and he followed two boys, six men, and a woman out to a muddy field, the boys describing the tendencies of the man who managed them. Driver, they called him. Man without name. “Cotton harder than corn or wheat,” the boys said, as if he would understand
the comparison. “Don grow good and hard to get da weight.” It was April cold. Wearing his woollen shirt, Bry stumbled along, shivering beside the boys in thin linsey, his stomach in turmoil as well as his mind. What was this place? How long would he have to stay? He rubbed at his eyes. The sun came up and lit the gunmetal ground and he saw that his skeletal companions were covered with grime. “You a sof nigga,” said Wimpie, the oldest of the three.

“Leave he,” said Miver.

“My pap died on a tree,” Bry told them proudly.

“Tink he son of Jesus.” Wimpie stopped long enough to put both hands on his thighs and laugh, showing buckteeth.

Benjamin had sometimes ridiculed Bry, but never about his father. No one had ever questioned that claim. Now Bry dragged along beside Miver and Wimpie and wondered when Bett or Mary or Wiley would come for him. What was he doing in this terrible place?

Cotton. First there was plowing, the ground prepared by throwing up ridges. Bry was considered old enough to struggle through soggy fields with a mule-drawn plow creating ridges six feet wide for the seed. Later there were furrows plowed between the ridges to hold water. Ridges and furrows. The other workers had been born to this, but Bry ached for a past that had been taken away from him in the course of an hour. At night, when Miver pushed his plank up close, they exchanged no words but listened to each other’s shaggy coughs while Bry lay on his side and searched through moments from that other life: Mary putting food on the table and calling Wiley to eat. Bett coming up from the underground rooms to cook and serve. “How is he faring?” she might ask about someone in town who was sick. It was a mystery to Bry, the two mothers healing patients in their different ways, one alone in the dark, one in the light. He could
hear, even now, the small clink of Wiley’s cup, since the table made a sounding board for knives and cups and plates. “Fetch us water, boy,” Wiley would say. And now he lay cold awake and wondered why no one came to take him home. It was all a mistake. Of course it was.

Because of the rains, the cotton was slow to sprout and Bry was put to chopping wood, always wet. His boots were ruined, his shirt and breeches torn. There was never a minute when he was not worse than hungry. He was famished. Starving. How did the others bear it? Sore in his muscles and feverish, he was expected to grind his own corn and plant any vegetables he meant to consume.
Consume
, that was the driver’s word. Something like stealing, it sounded like. He was made to haul his own water to drink in spite of his blistered hands. There was no water in which to wash. All of them reeked. A corn patty and slice of cold bacon was breakfast before dawn in the dark while the driver’s horn was blowing, and for dinner a bowl of mush in the darker dark. He went to the field hungry and his stomach, all day, seemed to tumble and sink. The only solace was the deep, low voice of Jimbo. It was a cavern Bry crawled into night after night as it spoke of Moses and a river of blood and a plague of locusts and a rain of hail and fire and the longing, wearying escape of slaves.

When the cotton sprouted in late May, the constant hoeing was more drudgery. By midday, Bry was faint. His shoulders ached. The driver sat on his horse while Bry and the others were put to scraping the dirt into little hills around each group of plants. Jimbo was in the lead with his hoe, working fast, smooth, even singing, and Bry tried to keep pace in order to hear that harmony. Once, in the cabin, Jimbo had made Bry laugh, playing an invisible fiddle and pulling his own legs up and down with invisible string. But that was in the cabin. In
the field there was no fiddle, no smile – only the mournful song – and one afternoon, Jimbo stumbled and twisted his foot and the driver came charging up to him on his horse and lashed out with his whip. Before he raised his eyes to see, Bry heard the sound of the leather in the air, the sound of the strap on flesh. He had never seen anyone beaten. The hot sun. Green cotton spinning. Bry put his head down, everything going scabs in the dust, and Miver whispered, “Don neva look.”

When Bry opened his eyes, he saw the flesh of Jimbo’s back turned into meat and fell over, crashing into the tender plants.

At the next hoeing, he kept his eyes on the ground. The strongest stalk in each hill was now allowed to stand, the rest to be hoed away. “Ain nobody come to save ya yet,” the driver shouted at him. “Yo mama have to suck on me firs she want you back.”

Bry’s hands shook. Sweat made the hoe handle slippery and he cut through the wrong stalk. The driver’s legs dangled down the sides of his horse. He liked to chew on an unlit cigar or a twig and his teeth were brown. Bry had seen him spit on the kerchief that hung around his neck and use it to clean his face.

T
hat summer of 1810, Jemima began to visit the Millhouse to ease her heart. She was thirteen, with lightly freckled skin, curly hair, and her mother’s delicate blue-eyed face. She did not tell her father where she was going, but on those quiet walks to the edge of his first six acres, she pretended she was about to board a travelling coach and disappear through the great Cumberland Gap up ahead. What lay beyond that sheer wall of mountains, that curtain between her small world and the great western plains? Once, Mister Daniel Boone himself had stopped at their farm to refill his water flasks at the creek. He had spoken to her father and she had stood close by and listened. How long ago? I was only a child … The two men had much in common, since Mister Boone was born to Pennsylvania Quakers who had been disowned when his brother had married a non-Quaker girl. The family had moved to Tennessee and later Mister Boone had moved his own family into Kentucky. But first he had opened up the gap and widened the trail that went right by their door. Jemima remembered him as tall and friendly. He had made her father seem small and pale. Her father had talked about the weather and his fields and his disapproval of the trade in cotton, which “necessitated the keeping of slaves.” But Mister Boone referred to them as servants, saying they were to be thanked for their part in the American
experiment. He had lost two sons and a brother in a terrible attack by Indians, but he was oddly forgiving. “They murder our wives and children out of mistaken vengeance, when they should be glad of us since we bring innovation.”