The Purchase (40 page)

Ruth’s eyes wandered over the room. In one corner was the prized bureau, purchased in Baltimore by Benjamin, who was her favourite, even including her blood kin son, even in spite of his upcoming red brick house that would block her view of the world. The bureau had four drawers and a marble top and she kept her hairbrush and mirror there on a tray with a linen napkin, all of which looked very nice. I would like to be buried in that bureau, she had told Missus Dougherty on the day of John’s birth, and the pastor’s wife had laughed, saying that they would have to remove her arms and legs and put them in
different drawers parcelled out, then saying there was nothing to fear in a birthing. Ruth could remember the room at its different stages in its different lights with its several babies like the one now asleep on her lap. Little John lying in the corner in a trundle bed. Benjamin patting her, curled up next to her, Joseph in his cot beside the fireplace. The room was a series of pictures, with the dish and the linen napkin always there, although sometimes on the bureau of a different year. Same drawers and pulls, but full of baby things and seeds, unmended shirts. A shopping list, which could not be written or read, was memorized as salt for the top drawer, along with sugar and soda. Coffee in the second drawer, with ground corn and flour. Cloth in the third drawer for piecing a quilt.

She looked at the window, remembering the boy who had fitted it into the wall. He had carried the churn and believed when the angel spoke, but she had never looked at him. “In the matter of keeping slaves and such,” Missus Dougherty always said, “it is an institution to foster grief.” Who can eat cotton? A man must grow corn, wheat, oats, and timothy grass. She sometimes looked at the brick walls rising up in front of her house and wondered how it was possible to consume such quantities of earth and ash?

Ruth shifted her legs where the new baby lay. She took Daniel’s grandchild up in her arms and walked to the wall of quilts. That first night, Daniel had picked her up from the bed as he would little Joseph or Jemima and lifted her dress off her shoulders and arms and set her down again, bare. So long ago that had been. And now, for years, he hadn’t touched her. “Husband,” she said softly. “Open your eyes.”

O
n the road, an oncoming mule and wagon swerved recklessly and Daniel reined in Miss Patch so suddenly that she threw him. The driver jumped down and Daniel held up his uninjured arm, then lowered it. His head had a gash.

“Father of a whore! You are damned lucky not to be dead,” Rafe shouted.

Daniel got to his feet and leaned over to pick up his hat as if it should be treated more tenderly than a man. He remounted his mare, holding his arm at an angle. The pain in his shoulder was intense and there was a trickle of blood in his eye, but a sense of grace had come over him. “Should we not be consoling each other?”

Rafe went back to his empty wagon.

Daniel rode on. At Mary’s door, he entered without knocking, as he had done since Wiley’s departure. He had sometimes come to his daughter’s to eat a meal or pray with her, but what he saw now was Mary sitting quietly by her sister’s body, which lay on a cot, covered by a quilt. She looked up at her father. “You are hurt, Papa.”

“Never mind.”

She gestured at the room, which was in disarray, with broken crockery on the floor. “Rafe could not be restrained. He is looking for Bry. And Bett.”

“I do not want to think what they’ll do to Bry when they bring him back. I am sure he has gone north, is what Bett says. She follows him.”

Mary put her hands over her face. “No one will show any pity.”

Daniel knelt beside Jemima. His chest felt noosed, the cut on his head throbbed, his shoulder ached; he reached out and plucked at the quilt. He had not seen this child for almost two years, and gazed now at a face yellowed and aged. Her long hair was rubbed into tangles. Her arms were covered with scratches, her nails bloody.

Mary, too, stared at her sister, trying to imagine a girl so hungry for love that she would run away with a man, unmarried. Or was it the other way? Had Jemima loved Bry and found her way to him through Rafe? She wondered how she had lived without her sister’s company and how she would live on alone for the rest of her life. In truth, she had taken too much for granted, believing that anything lost could be found again. Jester Fox was only the first of her sins. She had kept Bett from freedom out of her own selfish need. On a shelf of the corner cupboard there was a plate with two doves painted on it, heads under wings. Mary thought of two runaways, crossing mountains and rivers, hunted. Bett had saved Jemima’s baby through all the knowledge she had gained in a hopeless life. Now she was forced to flee. It would be cold in the mountains. Soon enough the rivers would turn to ice. Mary looked at the room, which contained the meaningless trifles of her meaningless life. A bowl of apples sat on the sideboard as if someone might still wish to eat them. The clock still said its weariness out loud. There was a pillow on the chair, embroidered.
Hold Me Too Dear
. She thought of the Day of Revelation, when all things will be decided.
Is he going to find you with your lamps trimmed and waiting?
If the dead could not return, what did she now owe the
living? She stood up, feeling almost serene, and found a cloth to soak in camomile for the cut on her father’s head. “Stay here with Jemima,” she told him calmly, with a sudden understanding of what she must do. “I will find a dress for the grave and send Ruth to do the laying out.”

Daniel searched her eyes.

“I must find Bett. She carries no pass.”

“Take the baby with you. She will not be safe here.”

Mary leaned over and kissed the top of his head.

“You were only a child, Mary,” he said softly. “When Jester Fox fell.”

She packed the medicines she might find useful in the black leather bag. It smelled of a thousand drops of relief and a thousand of forgetfulness. Another thousand drops had been spilled in the name of hurry or sorrow or waste. The bag was the gift from her father that had meant most to her. Perhaps it was even the only gift from him, since he did not offer humour or sentiment. Thee is thy mother’s child, he had always said. Tick tick tick. Would her grave be abandoned the day it was dug? Childless, who would remember her? Mary took her cloak from its hook. It had been the attire of her doctoring trips and smelled of something like yeast in its seams. Who will trim the wicks and clean the stove? “Wait here for Ruth,” she said again.

She took a last look at her sister, who lay with her face uncovered, eyes forever closed, then crossed the room and went out of her house and harnessed the bay to her cart. In it, she placed the medical bag, a pillow sleeve full of rags and bits of cloth, and a blanket in which to wrap the baby. Overhead, clouds were swimming fitfully. Birds were beginning to sing. It would soon be dawn.

And Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar.… And sent her away
. Daniel glanced at the table. Two cups, two spoons. Two geese flying north on two plates. Who was it set for? There was crockery on the floor in large and small pieces as if walking was to be, from now on, a penance.

O
n the campground so generously given by Frederick Jones, small huts had been built inside a fenced enclosure. The huts contained crude beds for the use of campers who came with food and bedrolls to the summer revival meetings, but the group that was waiting under the tabernacle roof was there only for brief prayers and a eulogy. The Craigs sat on a bench, elbows on knees, as if afraid to be noticed. The Sharpes were there, looking dolefully at the floorboards. Frederick and Julia Jones stood at the back, watching the road as if Wiley might come home from the war in time for this funeral. There were others waiting to give their condolences to Daniel and Ruth. Among them were three of the children they had raised: Isaac, Benjamin, John.

When Daniel pulled into the campground, a group sheltering under the tabernacle roof came out to help with the coffin he could not lift. His shoulder was tightly wrapped but it hurt almost unbearably. And there was Isaac, his prodigal. Then all three sons came forward and took up the coffin along with Hiram Craig. They carried it under the roof and balanced it carefully on a bench at the front near the altar. He led Ruth to a seat. Then, for those gathered, a long hour of sitting and shifting and checking the road commenced, after which it was clear to those gathered that the pastor was not going to appear. Nor was Mary, which the neighbours thought was odd. Benjamin’s wife,
Elizabeth, was sitting with her husband and his two brothers. Her eyes were covered with a hand and her dress was sombre. Mister Sharpe cleared his throat in a meaningful way. Still, no one spoke. More minutes. Waiting. More shifting. A baby was taken out to be fed. Below the simple cross that adorned the altar, Jemima lay shut away in her coffin wearing the dress Mary had chosen. Ruth had laid cornflowers over its stain.

And it was Ruth who finally stood up, smoothing the back of her skirt and moving toward the coffin uneasily. She turned to her neighbours, nervously smoothing her skirt again, and looked at each one in turn. Each of them had known Jemima. Each of them had bought butter and medicines from the family. “Eighteen of you are here,” she said softly, counting, nodding at Daniel, who was slumped over in his old Quaker hat. “Eighteen of you left your labours in your houses and fields.” She dipped her head. “And we thank you for that.”

Among the neighbours, the women sat in dark dresses and hats with brims. They were farmwomen now, even those who had been raised in far-off towns.
Speak out
, the angel had said. And Ruth had neglected to do it. Among the eighteen, there were women with knowing smiles, women who spoke behind their hands, and men who judged others more strictly than they judged themselves. Her palms were damp. “One of our children …” She said it so quietly that only three or four nearby listeners could hear. “One of our children,” she said with a little more force, “was lost to us. Didn’t Matthew say in the Bible,
See that you do not despise these little ones. For I tell you that their angels will always see the face of my Father in heaven
.” Ruth opened her hands as if to show that they were empty. “Once I was told to speak out, but I never knew what to say. All those words in the good book, you know, sounded so right and wise that I could never find my own.”

At this, Hiram Craig stood up and pushed past shoulders and legs to come forward. He took Ruth’s right hand and put his Bible in it, open to Matthew.

Ruth said, “Well, I thank you, Mister Craig, but I can’t read.” Her face was set and stern. “In that Brandywine poorhouse I never got schooling up to the day I was brought to the Dickinsons as a servant. Then there were five children to raise. They lost their mama, though I didn’t care so much about that or their feelings. Jemima was not but two years old and I was a child myself and I did not love her. When she climbed onto her papa’s knee, I was even bitter. It was myself who wanted to be loved. I had neither mama nor papa, you see. And some time after that, we came here to Jonesville before it had a name or anything to it. There were no houses yet except for Mister and Missus Jones, who had already built.” Ruth nodded at the coffin. “Her father being then in search for a place where his children could be raised with neighbourly love, the wagon was stopped just three miles up this road. And soon there were neighbours enough.” She paused, then said, “and maybe none of us can be blamed for one lost sheep in our pasture, being so busy as we must have been. But I think God must have a mean streak, though, if He made us in His image, since we showed Jemima no pity.” Seeing shocked expressions all around, Ruth took the lid of the coffin off and dropped it on the floor. “Unless
we
invented meanness just in order to entertain our own selves. What does it say in here?” she waved Hiram Craig’s heavy Bible but paid no mind to the page. “It says,
He looked for some to have pity on Him, but there was no man, neither found He any to comfort. They gave Him gall to eat. And when he was thirsty they gave Him vinegar to drink
. And so it was with us.” She looked over at Isaac. She took a deep breath and looked into the coffin. “Jemima, I know your angel will see the face of our Father.”