The Purchase (35 page)

All the way home, Mary spoke in this way to her husband, sometimes weeping, sometimes chastising him for his diligence. Isaac does not need you now, she would say. Isaac does not need you, but I need you.

O
ne season passed to the next. “We hear a new missus up the house,” Julius said to Bett one Sunday and she looked straight at her son with such pity in her expression that he felt a chill run through him to his fingertips. She put a hand on his head as if to direct his thoughts away from what she had to say. “It is Jemima,” she told him quietly.

Bry pushed hard away from her, hurling himself out of the cabin, the door gaping as he disappeared into the fast-growing corn. He ran for a long time, cutting his feet on the ruts and stalks. This was the field used by the slaves for their portions, but he lay down in a furrow, covered his head with his arms, and beat at the ground with his feet and legs, caring nothing for the plants. Back in the cabin there was sad singing and he heard pieces of it and knew he would have to kill Mister Rafe and wondered how to do it. He thought long on this while he lay there listening to the crows and the rustling cornstalks. Panting. Furious. How? When? The thought of it made the cornfield spin. He must find a weapon. Must go into the house. The house where Jemima now lives. Then came a thought: she will get me free. She’s come here for that and nothing else. She’s given herself for me. He thought this without shame. He sucked in his suffering breath and imagined the day. He would take Jemima and go north, as the old man with the chain on his
wrists and legs had done. Stars. One always in the same place. The old man waiting to welcome them. We will get hungry in the wild, he thought. We will have to crawl through the woods all night without sleep. The woods will be full of wolves and bears and snakes. How will I know the right way? And how will we ask when catchers and their hunting dogs will be after us? What places bear names where land is measured between springs and trees?

A few days later Jemima walked hurriedly down the rutted road past the cotton fields and turned into the cornfield. She cut through the cornrows, which were erect and tasselled and whispering old grass words. The conversation between one stalk and another was intense and private, but the whispering made a rustling company and Jemima parted the stalks so that she could move between them without being seen. She was sixteen years old and an outcast, just as her father had been in Brandywine. For making my choice, is what she said to herself. Just as he did.

It took a time to cross the field, moving the stalks away from her face with her hands. These plants had been here as small things when Rafe first brought her out to the shade hut where he had hidden a jug of brandy and a handful of flowers. Now she slipped under the hut’s thatched roof and brushed off the wooden bench where she had first sat with Rafe. Months ago that had been and she had seen no sign of Bry then or after, although she had looked for him. She had supposed that she could not ask after him for fear of another lecture or worse. What would Rafe think? But now she had sent him a message through Bett, telling him where she would be. She waited, the bench growing hard under her, and looked through the cornrows until she saw someone coming in a tall black hat. “That hat makes
you stick out a mile,” she hissed as he got within hearing distance. Then joy, it was, to hold on to him after years apart.

“Who did that to you?” He levelled a look at the scratches on her arm and frowned to hide his great pleasure at being with her.

She lifted her arm to look at it. “Just Charlie, my old cat,” she said absently. “I brought him along to keep me company in that house.” She pointed, as if Bry might not know where she lived.

“You’re wearing his boots.”

“Whose, Charlie’s?” She tried a small laugh, lonely for everything gone, her family, her childhood.

“He should buy you new ones.” Bry spun around and kicked at the bench.

“Who cares about boots? Look at yourself. I come all this way through the cotton and corn after all this time and what do I find but bare feet to greet me.” She used a rude word in their secret language.

Bry drew her to the bench she had cleaned of leaves. Then his hands were on her, feeling each bone for change.

“I brought you Papa’s book.”

“Did he give it to you for me?”

Jemima wondered at his innocence. “He won’t come after it, that I know, as he won’t even come to see me. Nobody will. But please … I want you to read it to me the way you used to do. Will you do that for me?” She searched his face for its known expressions – anything, even the way he used to cross his eyes to frighten her or poke out his tongue, the way he crinkled his face when she made him laugh, but he was serious now, and thinner and taller. She handed him the book wrapped in a cloth. “I can find a way to come here. It is not so hard to leave when he goes away every evening.” She sat staring at the friend she had loved best in her life and a misery came over her as she remembered
him combing her hair with her boar-bristle brush in the warmth of their private cave. It was a feeling of hunger, an emptiness that made no sense, for here he was, big as life although older and worn to a hardness she did not recognize. She put her head on his shoulder and let herself breathe, something taken, something given back. She put her hand in her dress and pulled out her brother Benjamin’s knife with its handle of ivory. The book had been heavy. The knife was undeniable, and time blew in through the slats of the hut from the hot, dry fields.

“G
o get my sister.” These were the first words Isaac had spoken in days. He had walked from the state of New York and down through Pennsylvania. He had worked his way from one farm to another over a period of months. He was carrying his rolled-up blanket and a dry canteen. He was foot-sore and half delirious and he threw himself at the pig trough and drank thirstily before he said those first words to Floyd’s oldest boy, who was tending the animals. Twisting one forefinger around the other as if he’d invented a game, he repeated, “Go get my sister, do you hear?” Was he making no sound with his lips? Floyd’s boy looked scared or deaf, holding his head at a slant. “How old are you now?” If this was home, he had come back to it after a lifetime away. What language did they speak? “What month is it?” he asked. What year?

“She gone.” The boy stood with his mouth open, staring hard at someone who had once been straight-backed and clean.

“Gone? My sister?”

“Yesar. To Mista Rafe.”

“Why? Is he ill?”

“Nosar.” The boy thumped at his chest. “To be the wife of he. It Jemima, I sayin about.”

Jemima married to Rafe? Isaac felt limp. He sat down hard on a bale of hay. “It’s Mary I want. Please get her for me. I need
food and something for my feet. Say nothing to my father, do you hear? Don’t you tell him I am down here or I’ll cut off your damned tongue.”

“Nosar.” Floyd’s oldest boy saluted and Isaac frowned and lay back and let his thoughts drift. What in hell was his little sister doing getting married to Rafe Fox? His thoughts tumbled in disarray until he slept, and when Mary arrived, breathless from running, Isaac crawled slowly to his feet, bent over like an old man, and she came into his arms and held him, even weeping, although she said, “Brother, if anything happened to my husband, you know I’ll blame you.”

“It was our father who made him go. But listen.” He was patting her back, which felt bony and small under his hand. “You have a brother who has come a long way.”

She saw Wiley’s fine rifle braced up against the wall of the shed. “Where is he, Isaac? You must tell me.”

Isaac said, “Maybe he ran off as I did. After the explosion. Maybe in that case, he could be … anywhere.”

“Anywhere.” Mary was clutching at him.

“There were a few of us running together …” Isaac hung his head and patted her roughly again, as if that would give her courage to face what might be ahead. “… and some were killed when we took to the streets.” His knees wobbled. He wanted badly to lie down, even at her feet. “How is Papa?”

“Unforgiving.”

“And Jemima is married to that devil Rafe?”

“Not married. Just left. Months ago. Almost a year now. Papa pretends she has gone back to Brandywine. It’s his feeble excuse for her disappearance since no one has seen her at all. She never goes anywhere.”

“Our father has never told a lie in his life. What happens when she decides to take a walk into town?”

Mary said nothing to that. There were different forms of falsehood. Isaac was peeling off layers of fabric, and she told him she would find some of Wiley’s clothes for him and bring him a plate of food. There was rabbit stew simmering, even then, in her fireplace. “Do you want to come now to my house? I have room for you.”

But Isaac lay down on the dry straw of a stall at the back of the shed, too tired to take another step, and Mary went back to her house, then brought food and clean water to wash the infected blisters on his feet. She knelt beside him. She bathed and bandaged his feet. She retired the terrible boots he had worn over hills and through valleys thick with water and snakes and festering mud. Isaac sat up briefly to eat. Then at last, unvisited by family or even dreams, he slept for three days while Floyd’s wife Cherry came into the shed and milked the cows and Floyd’s sons tended the pigs and news went up to the house that the prodigal son was back.

On the third night, when he woke to find Floyd’s oldest boy at his side with another plate of food from Mary, he tried to remember how he had come there. Already he had forgotten specific places where he had worked scything hay or picking fruit. He seemed not to have spoken except to barter for a meal in exchange for labour. What he remembered was in pieces.

He told Floyd’s son, “You know what? They’ve got a slave regiment up there. Can you imagine? In Upper Canada.”

The boy shook his head.

“Slaves, British soldiers, all of them escaped from down here. They took me prisoner. Imagine that!” Chewing on a bone, Isaac laughed quietly. So many words it would take to ever tell how the Virginians had marched on foot, new boys and men untried,
and boarded a ship and sailed across water as wide as the sky. He had forgotten how to string that many syllables together, so he stared at Floyd’s boy, who was hammering at the trough where it had sprung a leak and asking how they’d ever captured him, those soldier slaves.

“Oh, that was easy enough. First, we got to a place by the name of Queenston Heights. Because up there every name is a king or queen.”

Isaac took a breath and sighed at the memory. “I didn’t even fire. Not so much as a bullet. Though I loaded a cannon. I did that.”

Floyd’s son leaned against the pig trough, gaping.

“They treated me fine. For some time I was with Wiley and we sat up and talked all night. Just about everything got discussed by the two of us in that stockade. You should get yourself up there, boy. It’s just like here, only better. You and your brother … and Bry. You ever see him? You should run off and join up with that regiment.”

“He over the same place like Jemima.”

“But have you seen him, is what I meant.”

“Nosar, I don’t care to.”

“Well, that’s a fine friend you are. Will the Fox brothers eat you up?”

“They got a driver chase around niggers with a whip.”

Isaac put out a hand to rub the neck of the sow that lay at his feet.

He had missed his pigs. He had missed everyone. And now he was back and even his brothers did not come to the shed to welcome him home. “Where is Mary? I’m hungry again.” He began a long conversation with himself and decided he could not take Mary up on her invitation as it would only make trouble for her.

He smiled at Floyd’s boy. “We had General Pike to command us,” he said. “Ever hear of him?” He looked at the plate he had cleaned of food a few hours before and told Floyd’s boy that even when Pike was killed, they had come on into York like a horde. “That was after we were traded out of the stockade. Then the explosion when the Britains blew themselves up. Rampaging is what we did. Right down one street and up another is how we went and we broke into stores and took whatever we could.”