The Purchase (8 page)

Daniel had pulled himself up on his wobbly feet. He had been on his knees, quite unnoticed in the crisis of setting the leg, and he had watched Bett’s skill with astonishment. While he stood over Simus, Mary carefully moved the boy’s head onto a pillow of leaves and ran all the way back to the house site before Daniel could blink. She took up a thin piece of oak that had been hewn and set aside for pegs all the while feeling she was breathing a stranger’s breath, watching what happened around her through a stranger’s eyes.

In the clearing, Bett drew a flat bandage from her bag. It had been cut into tails on both sides and these she lapped across the front of the leg. Next, the clay paste and finally, when Mary came back, the splints. These were tied with straps while Mary held the boy’s head in her lap again and brushed her fingers across his closed eyelids.

Daniel’s plan was to get the boy up to the house site, where he could be kept dry and fed, but Bett said firmly that it mustn’t be that way. “His leg must just set now, sir, for a number of days
without jostling. Best put up a shelter,” she instructed while she rummaged in her bag and then brought out a tin full of powder and a bottle that gave off a smell when she loosened its cork. She mixed powder and liquid in a tiny tin cup from her bag and told Simus to swallow it. “All up.”

Daniel went back to the house site while Mary marched through the timber lot looking for pieces of wood. All around were the sounds of the forest, for the sun was angled and the trees were hospitable to living things. They were alive now with almost returning spring, and the boy who was going to help build a house for them was lying in the timber lot and she had found him and saved him and her heart was light.

D
aniel looked at his hands as if anything they touched would break. He knew a moment of self-pity but swallowed it back. Since Rebecca had gone … had died … had disappeared into her grave … nothing, ever … He was sorry to be thinking of the two hundred and fifty dollars he needed and the house to be built instead of the injured boy and his pain. He was sorry to be thinking of his unsheltered children who would lack a house as well as a mother here in Virginia when there was a boy lying on icy cold ground down in the timber lot with a shattered leg. He was sorry he had come to Virginia, although what choice did he have? The Elders had drawn the new map of his ruined life when an unschooled Methodist girl had offered the only help in sight. “What do we do now?” she asked him as he sat with his head in his hands, but it was that part of afternoon when birds and animals and men have nothing to say.

“Read to me from the manual,” Ruth told him, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear and picking up the axe. “Tell me how to start.”

“You cannot build a house, Ruth Boyd.”

“You will have the good of four hands and one head.”

“You don’t credit yourself with a brain?”

“I didn’t name whose head, did I?” Ruth looked at the bare ground where their boots – two large and two small – were
moored side by side. Her stockings were torn inside her boots and there was skin visible, but she tucked her feet back and watched a beetle crawl up the pile of thin rocks that held the house frame. She thought what a long way it was for the beetle and yet to her it was nothing. She thought then that there was no one single truth, even in size. Daniel handed her the book. She said, “You read while I cut notches.”

“Only to cut off your hand.”

“Or my nose to spite my face.” Ruth laughed a little and even nudged him gently.

Daniel began with the words that described the hewing of notches. He said she could try to do that while he went to check on the boy. Ruth did not like the boy and would not venture close to him. Ruth picked up the axe, which was not very big, and Daniel went to the clearing, where he found Mary and Simus squeezed inside a shelter of sticks. “Mary Amelia, what business has thee … have
you
 … down here? Take yourself up to the house this minute!”

“We have no house,” said Mary. “Not anymore.”

Daniel kicked at the flimsy shelter and the boy covered his head with an arm while the sticks came tumbling down on him and Mary scrambled out of the way. “I gathered all of that,” she said crossly.

Daniel thought for just a moment. “And who do you suppose is looking after your little brothers and your sister? Where is Jemima just now, and that rascal Benjamin? It is your job to keep track of them all. The boys are to keep the fire and you must watch them to be sure they manage. They are not … country lads … after all.” He was watching Mary and, out of the side of one eye, seeing the boy on the ground surrounded by sticks. This was no place for his Mary to be loitering. He turned to look straight at Simus, who was staring up at him,
frightened. “Isaac is to gather the wood …” Daniel muttered, feeling sorry he had frightened the boy and a little ashamed of himself. “Benjamin, the kindling …” his words trailed off.

Mary got up, brushed twigs and sticks off her dress, and began walking away without a glance back. Always, he left her in charge of the others, and she continually failed to satisfy him. Now she would not let him see that she felt the sting of his words. She would not remind him of the way she had run to the Fox place to save a boy who was lying alone on the dirt with a leg snapped off. In order to show that she would never hurry – not for little children who were healthy and fine when here was a boy who had nearly died – her walk was slow and indignant, almost a trudge. Nobody to look after poor Simus and his brother lost forever to a Tennessee slave trader while he was stuck in the frightening woods like bait and where was Ruth Boyd? Wasn’t she hired to look after the little ones? Wasn’t she the reason they had come to this nasty place where boys were made into slaves?

“Father,” she said that evening when the younger children were in bed with Ruth and she and her father were sitting close to the outside fire. Father. It was the name she rarely used, preferring Papa, which was affectionate. “Who made Simus a slave?” She was mending her hem with white thread and the stitches were crooked because of the lack of light and she kept her voice low although she was once again furious.

“The institution is as old as time, Mary Amelia,” her father answered sadly.

“Old as time? That isn’t scientific.”

“Child, slavery was known to the ancient Hebrews and is spoken of in the Bible. In Rome, there were house slaves and farm slaves. Virgil writes of them living in Mantua.”

“Simus is not Roman, though. And we are abolitioners.”

“Simus is safe here with us, I can promise you.” Daniel stared at his daughter, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground by the fire. “Although a Quaker does not make a vow,” he admitted with a sly smile. “Does he?” Over them an array of stars shone so brightly that the embers on the ground hardly counted for light as Mary pushed the needle in and out of her torn hem. Daniel stretched his legs. “I doubt that Simus knows the name of his ancestral home and he will surely never see it again so we must take care of him.”

Mary said, “That’s what I was trying to do,” but she said it under her breath. She thought of her lessons at school in Pennsylvania.
Who inhabit Western Africa?
Answer:
Numerous Negro Tribes in a barbarous condition
. She said, “But who brought him here?”

Daniel remembered suddenly that the slaves in Virgil’s province had been interred in rich tombs. He said, “I did. And before me, it was someone who sails to Africa to trade goods for men. As you learned in school last year. About the Indians and how they couldn’t do useful things for the colonists, remember? So then Africans were brought to Virginia to raise things like tobacco and rice. We cannot farm without labour. And we must farm to survive.”

“Although we never did before.”

Daniel took off his hat and scratched his neck. He ran his hand over his chin and decided it was time for another shave. He was getting careless. And his daughter was showing quick intelligence. “Ah, Mary …” The boys were young enough that they didn’t wonder at things or question him. They were sorry Simus had hurt his leg. They mentioned him now and then, but they did not go into the timber lot, which was dreary and dark.

“Thee should give up thy Quaker hat,” said Mary, “if thee is no longer an abolishoner.”

“Abolishonist. And I will give up my hat when I can afford a better.”

“Like violinist. Like gardenist. When you can afford a better hat, you will buy back Miss Patch, who you traded for Simus.” Mary bit off the thread and inserted the needle in her apron at the shoulder, where she could be sure to find it. She wished she could say goodnight to her new friend, who would be frightened down there in the timber lot lying on his back with his leg wrapped in straps and clay so that he couldn’t move. He had such a fear of snakes. He said he dreamed of vipers that wore masks. Mary said she would tell him the story of Aeneas so that he would feel brave, although her father wouldn’t let her take the book outside for it was delicate. She would read a chapter every morning and then retell it while Simus lay in the shelter Daniel had built by hauling a bundle of house logs down to him in the wagon cover and arranging them back and forth using nails, which she had not had when she built the first shelter. Nor had she had the canvas to use as a roof, weighed down with rocks. And she was only trying to be kind or what her father would call compassionate when he remembered what mattered in this world.

At the door of the lean-to, Mary turned and looked at him. She watched him take back the fire and stretch out in its warmth, but even as she watched, she was thinking of Simus, whose shelter sat so crookedly in the distance, a dark shape in the dark.

W
hen Mary told Simus about the wooden horse and the ships that sailed away from Troy to find a new home, he said, “Like I,” and she wondered if he had sailed from Africa to Virginia. She told him about Hector and Achilles. “Everyone loved Hector,” she said. “He was more brave than any man.”

Simus disagreed. “You say to me that Aeneas carry his father on his back to leave Troy and make a new home. That is more brave.”

That night, while the children sat around the rough puncheon table Daniel had built, Mary told them that Simus thought the Trojan horse had wings. “But that one is Pegasus,” Benjamin
said and even Jemima laughed, although she didn’t know what it was that they found funny. She loved the story of the flying horse. Daniel levelled a stern gaze at Mary. “Why mock the boy?” he asked. “Is it for this that you provide him with stories?”

Mary studied her plate. The boys were giggling again but it was in nervousness.

The scene worried Daniel during much of the night along with the thought that he had brought his children into a sense of superiority through the purchase of an unlettered boy. “You surely want your freedom,” he said to Simus the next day. “And I wish to offer it. But you must help me earn two hundred dollars first or how will I get my horse again? I cannot make such a sum alone. Do you see?” It seemed that the Lord would only help those who could find devious ways to help themselves. “For the present, you will mend your broken bone and merely cut pegs. But when the leg is healed, you will go out to work for others in the evenings. That way we will earn cash … have an income … and …” Daniel would have the money required to redeem Miss Patch and it would be possible to free the slave boy. Pleased with this idea, arms folded across his chest, he waited for the boy to react.

But Simus said nothing. Knowing Daniel had paid too much for him and knowing that half the amount paid would be beyond his ability to earn in the span of his life. What was there to say? “Full day pay two bits,” he finally replied.