Olivia, Mourning (8 page)

One day in February Mourning finally asked, “Just where it be, this land we gonna farm? Show me on the map.”

Olivia felt as if he had kicked her in the stomach. She wasn’t prepared for it. She was so busy convincing him, she forgot to convince herself. But there it was, him saying it out loud, agreeing to go with her. For a moment she stared at him, stunned. Then she had to restrain herself from throwing her arms around him. In the end, all she did was point at the map and say, “Well, now that that’s finally settled, we can get down to planning. From now on we have to be extra careful not to be seen together.”

Olivia went through her father’s desk and found the deed to the land and a copy of both wills – Uncle Scruggs’ and Seborn’s. She took them upstairs and slipped them into a thick envelope that she hid under her mattress. Then she began pouring over her guidebooks again, underlining important points and making neatly printed lists. When she next met with Mourning she caught him studying her when he thought she wasn’t looking.
He must be wondering if I’ll really go through with it,
she thought.
Same as I’m wondering about him
.

They would buy most of what they needed in Detroit and so planned to carry as little as possible – only their clothing, a few personal belongings, and Mourning’s heavy case of tools, which he called his Most Precious Belongings. As far as Olivia could see, it was pretty much his only belonging. Olivia would also bring the double-barreled shotgun Uncle Scruggs had given to her and she planned to relieve Tobey of the flintlock Hawken rifle and flintlock pistol that had been birthday presents to him from their father. Tobey never touched them. They had been under the eaves collecting dust for as long as Olivia could remember.

Olivia and Mourning both wrote down everything they thought they needed to buy when they got to Detroit and compared lists. The necessities – lanterns, whale oil, matches, soap, rope, washtub, bedding, pots, pans, water barrel – seemed endless. There was always something else.

“You forgot feed for the oxen,” she reminded Mourning one evening.

“Ain’t forgot,” he said. “We don’t gotta be buyin’ no team. We can hire us a wagon in Detroit to take us to your uncle’s place. Farmers don’t buy no team when they just startin’ out. Ain’t none a them can afford to. They pull their own stumps and push their own plows.”

“Well, we
can
afford to,” Olivia said. “Do you have any idea how many stumps are going to need pulling? And if you think you’re going to call me out and hitch me to the plow, you can think again. You save on buying oxen and we’re likely to miss a season. That’s poor man’s thinking,” she quoted her father. “Save a penny and lose making a dollar.”

“Cost a lot a money to feed ’em.”

“I know that. But we can offer to rent them out to other farmers for a few days a week to help pay for their keep and soon enough we’ll be growing whatever they eat.”

“Bet they ain’t no corn-crackers out there what got any cash money to be rentin’ oxen.”

“Then we’ll barter. For butter and eggs or whatever they do have – or for work. It will be worth it in the long run. My father always said: you have to spend money to make money.”

“You say so. It your money.”

She relentlessly planned and ticked off items, but lay awake most nights, terrified. What if the boat sinks? Catches on fire? The engine explodes and kills us? Could slave-catchers really drag Mourning down south? What about Indians? Robbers? The only way she got any sleep was by reminding herself that they weren’t really going to go – Mourning was sure to back out at the last minute.

For Olivia the hardest part of preparing for life in the Michigan woods was trying to decide how much of what type of clothing to take. The guidebooks warned that there would be nothing else to wear until the women had begun shearing sheep, spinning wool, weaving yarn, and sewing clothes. Olivia had no intention of performing any of those chores. Fae’s Landing must have a dressmaker and a general store that sold fabric. She decided to pack six dresses – two for Sunday best, two for work in the summer, and two for winter. On second thought, perhaps she’d better take three winter work dresses. There was no telling how long it would take clothes to dry in winter, in front of a fireplace in a small cabin. Or out in the barn where they would turn to ice.

Olivia was glad Mabel Mears had nagged Avis into putting in a small stock of the new factory-made dresses. She waited to do her shopping until Monday afternoon, when she knew Mabel would be at her knitting circle. She had no desire to hear Mabel’s opinion of a girl wearing bright colors when she should still be in mourning.

She loved the first summer dress she pulled off the rack. It was soft cotton – a simple print of wispy blue flowers on ivory, with a narrow white collar and sleeves that cuffed below the elbow. The dark blue apron – front and back panels that tied together at the sides – had deep pockets.

Avis was busy behind the counter up front and paid her no mind. Finally, she took a deep breath and strode over to him. “I’d like to take this dress home,” she said, draping it over the counter. “And look for a few others.”

“Mmmm…” He hardly glanced at it.

“Well, aren’t you going to say anything?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Well, is that all right with you? Do you want me to pay for it?”

“Pay for it? No, I don’t want you to
pay
for it. But I will praise the Lord that maybe you’re finally going to try to look like a young lady. You been wearing that brown sack so long, looks near ready to fall off. Take all the dresses you want. By all means.” He seemed embarrassed and turned to flee into the storeroom.

Why do I always expect the worst of him?
she wondered.
And then when he surprises me by being nice, I think he’s doing it for the wrong reasons.
But she couldn’t help suspecting that he considered it an excellent investment – spruce Olivia up a bit, maybe some poor man would take her off her brother’s hands
.

She picked out three more dresses – two of which she knew would have to be taken in – but it was the one of a deep royal blue that she couldn’t wait to try on. She hurried home, stepped into it, and stood in front of the hinged oval mirror in her room, beginning to understand why women fretted so much over their clothes. She looked like a whole different person, all grown up. Elegant. She still wore her dark hair like a young girl, cut blunt and shoved behind her ears, but now she swept it up with both hands and could imagine herself a real lady, all done up, with ringlets and ribbons in her hair.

Under the eaves she had found two large rectangular wicker baskets with lids that lifted on hinges. One of them had been half-filled with her mother’s clothes and Olivia wondered who’d packed them away after she died. Their father? Mrs. Hardaway? Good thing Mabel hadn’t been around back then; she’d have hung them in the store. Olivia cleaned the baskets and practiced packing: two velvet winter bonnets; two pairs of mitts; four cotton day caps; a corset; four chemises; a pile of stockings, garters, and extra white collars and cuffs. Then she started with the petticoats she so hated – three flannel, three muslin, three calico, and only one crinoline. She still had to fit in her dresses, an umbrella, a parasol, a heavy winter coat, and whatever she was going to wear on her feet.

Her guidebooks advised going barefoot as much as possible during the summer, in order to save shoe leather for cold weather. They also said one should save on scuffing by always, winter or summer, removing shoes when riding in a wagon. She had no intention of doing that either.

Mourning happened to be in Killion’s General the day she confiscated three pairs of work shoes. They were all the same, with cloth uppers, squared patent leather tips at the toes and heel sections, and laces at the inner ankle. That week, when they met near Uncle Scruggs’ grave to compare lists, Mourning asked why he had seen her carting off a barrel full of shoes.

“I’ll need them.”

“Ain’t nobody need no three pair a shoes.”

“If you want to risk having to run through the woods barefoot, that’s your affair, but I want to be sure to have enough sturdy work shoes. I’m only taking one pair for Sunday.”

“You mean them three ain’t all?”

“I can’t very well attend church in work boots.”

“I bet all them farmers wives out there do. If they even got a church.”

“It’s just one little pair of Roman sandals.”

“Roman what?”

“They’re real pretty.” She purposely annoyed him. “Black kid, cut low, with ribbons that lace right here across the instep and tie around the ankle. I got some clogs, too, with wooden soles and canvas straps, to wear over them, protect them from the snow or mud.”

“Now I know why you be needin’ a team of oxen.”

“Believe me, I wish I could go off with just a few shirts and trousers like you,” she said wistfully and this was the truth. “I didn’t make the rules about what women have to wear. But a person is better off decently dressed than not. Especially when that person is going someplace new. We’ll have to depend on other folks now and then and it’s best they don’t start out with a bad impression.”

Olivia owned few items of sentimental value. One of them was her mother’s hairbrush. It was wooden, with an intricate pattern of scrolls carved into its back. Every evening when she brushed her hair, she wondered what Nola June would have thought about her daughter running off. Was she up there in heaven horrified? Or cheering her on? Olivia couldn’t help but wonder if her mother’s state of “not quite right in the head” hadn’t been simple boredom.

One evening in mid-March Olivia knocked on Tobey’s door. He was lying on his bed, thumbing through a catalog of dry goods. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge and she perched next to him, holding out the wooden brush.

“Do you remember this?”

“Am I supposed to?”

“It was our mother’s. She gave it to me one Christmas. Told me Gram Sessions gave it to her, when she was my age.”

She ran the brush through her hair and then held it in her lap.

“Can’t say I do recall it.” Tobey blinked at her.

“What do you remember about her?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what do you remember about her?”

He thought for what seemed like an awfully long time.

“She used to knit a lot.”

“She did?” That took Olivia by surprise. She couldn’t understand how anyone had the patience to fool around with all those balls of yarn. All that knitting and purling and you had to take it on faith that anyone would want to wear what turned out. But it especially surprised her to hear that about Nola June. She couldn’t imagine her mother sitting in one place long enough to finish a row. In Olivia’s imagination Nola June never stopped moving.

“Oh yeah, she did. Hats and mufflers.”

“What else?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe she made a sweater now and then.”

“No, I mean, what else do you remember about her, besides knitting?”

“Well, let’s see. I remember her planting a lot of stuff out back. It’s all overgrown now, but when she was alive she kept it all trimmed and nice. Used to keep a real colorful flower garden. And she liked lemonade. I remember that. She was always pounding lemons on the kitchen table and mixing up big pitchers of it, so sweet even a kid could hardly drink it. She planted mint leaves out by the pump, so she’d always have some to add to the lemonade.”

“Can you remember her voice?”

He thought for a moment. “Not really. She was soft-spoken. I do know that. Never heard her raise her voice. And Father always spoke real gentle-like when he was talking to her.”

“I remember her brushing my hair with this brush. She’d sit me between her knees and brush and brush. That’s the only touch of hers I remember. The only thing at all. Except for her humming. In my mind she always seems to be humming. I’ve got her watch too,” Olivia said.

“Yeah, I do remember that. The gold one you can open up and put a picture in. Has a little gold pencil on the same chain.”

Olivia nodded. “Gram Sessions gave her that too. Do you think our father ever gave her any nice presents?”

“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t imagine it too likely. Wasn’t his way.”

She rested her head on Tobey’s shoulder and felt like crying. “I just hate it that I don’t remember her at all. I wish I had one clear memory. Just one. One thing that I knew was me truly remembering my mother and not a story I heard, or something I dreamed up.”

Tobey patted her knee and she rose to leave. Back in her room she searched for Nola June’s watch in the top drawer of her bureau and her fingers brushed something hard under a neat stack of handkerchiefs. Her mother’s combs. She’d forgotten about them. They were not for combing one’s hair, but the kind women use for decoration, a narrow row of seven or eight teeth, six inches long. One was of tortoise shell, the other two of bone. Bright red, green, and yellow stones sparkled at their crowns.

Suddenly Olivia’s mind opened to an image of Nola June, the way she had worn her hair every day, pinned up with simple hairpins, sometimes with a length of ribbon or flowers twined through it. Then she saw her mother descending the stairs on Christmas Eve, something shiny draped over her shoulders and two bone combs extruding from an intricate pile of hair. A princess. She was
not
a crazy lady. People only said those horrible things because they were so jealous of how elegant she was, the way she moved in an aura of light. Nola June would have hated Mabel Mears.

Olivia sighed and set the watch and combs on the bed next to the brush. She didn’t want to take them with her, for fear of losing them out in the wilderness, but neither did she want to leave them behind. She frowned for a moment, then returned one of the combs to the drawer and rolled the others up, together with the watch and hairbrush, in a flannel petticoat and tucked it into one of the baskets.

Later, when everyone was asleep, she lit a candle and slipped downstairs to take her Bible from the bookshelf, moving the other books farther apart, to hide the empty space. The writing on the inside cover, noting all the marriages, births, and deaths in the family, was in Nola June’s delicate hand. Olivia had added the deaths of her mother, Uncle Scruggs, and now her father. She took the Bible upstairs, wrapped it in a petticoat, and tucked it into the basket next to the money bag she had sewn. It was a cloth belt, from which four long pockets hung, that she planned to tie around her waist, under her skirt and petticoats. She would keep ten dollars emergency money in her stockings and the rest of the heavy gold coins in those pockets.

On the first of April she went to meet Mourning Free under the old covered bridge and handed him two five dollar coins.

“Safest thing would be to keep one in each boot,” she said. “So no matter what, you’ve always got some money. And you’d best collect any wages owing to you. I’d say we’re ready to go.”