The Purchase (12 page)

“You were dazed by the cold of the water.”

“It was saying for me to speak out, but why? What did it mean?”

Daniel stared at the pigs.

“It was a sweet voice, very natural but strange.”

Simus sucked in his breath, hung his head, and said, “I prays.” Or perhaps he said, “I praise.”

Ruth said, “I was on the watertop and I don’t know how to swim and I was held up.” She saw that the boy was attentive to that, his look showing a new regard for her that allowed her to think, as she set out across the meadow, which had earlier been a bog and which was now covered in wild flowers, yellow and white and pink, that she had been visited by some unearthly form of grace. And it must have been for a reason, she thought. It must have been a message, she said to herself as she took up the churn without feeling its weight. Then she stopped in her tracks, listening to the boy’s hobbling gait behind her. The sun was lowering in the sky and she dropped the churn and walked ahead while he stopped, picked up the churn, and followed her with his limp.

“We’re to have nails,” she said over her shoulder. “You get to makin shingles with Mister Jones’s knife now.” A slave was lower than an orphan, and this one limped behind her and when she got to the half-built house he put the churn down and waited while she sent Isaac to the box in the wagon to find the borrowed shingle knife. “Tonight you sleep out here longside your pa,” she said to Isaac. “I need more space in the bed.” She found the milking pail and went to Tick as she did every day at
this time. She saw again in her mind the vision in the tree, dancing, jittery, and sat down on the milking stool with the thought of it in her head. She had been to church with her husband, met the pastor’s wife, acquired a stool and a churn, and been visited by a presence that had spoken a message in words.
Speak out
. She laid her river-washed face against the cow’s flank while her hands pulled at the teats and the teats released warm, yellow milk. The world was rearranged, dusted, and shined.

Standing against the wall of the lean-to, Simus said, “I to put all cream in the holy water before butter makin.”

Ruth stared at him and saw that he was right, although she did not like his watching or his interference. She did not like his skin, which was night-coloured and unsavoury. She had never known a black man of any kind. She had known Luveen for a time, but that was different. She saw that this slave boy was drawn to participate in something that was hers alone, yet she acknowledged his reverence. Without his tears in the timber lot, she might not have understood the importance of the angel’s words. Angel, it must have been. Finished with the cow she got up, pointed to the pail, then walked away while into a pitcher Simus poured enough milk for supper, then covered the pail with a cloth and took it away to cool. Tomorrow he would skim the milk and put the cream in the old Pennsylvania crock. The crock would be set between river rocks to make holy the cream inside.

R
uth was ready with five pounds of butter by the end of the week and there was still milk for the family. Would Daniel drive her to the pastor’s? Daniel hitched Mulberry to the wagon and found an errand to do in town. “I was visited by an angel the other day,” Ruth told the pastor’s wife.

Missus Dougherty raised an eyebrow.

“At our creek, ma’am. And this here butter got cooled in the waters right under her wings. She was high up a tree, just restin for a bit.” Ruth was surprisingly composed at this moment. Her unruly hair was shoved under a cap, and while her apron was somewhat stained, her face was without a single doubt.

Missus Dougherty put a finger in the butter and then in her mouth. “Well, it’s tasty, I’ll say that. But do not go boasting to the pastor of your angel, Miss Dickinson. It will get him riled up.”

Ruth said, “
Missus
Dickinson, ma’am.”

Missus Dougherty glanced at Ruth’s waistline.

“I be married from a church and unspoiled to this day,” Ruth assured her.

Missus Dougherty was to have a social gathering the next day, and there it was heralded that the young
Missus
Dickinson had been visited by a spirit of some kind on Sunday afternoon at Sawmill Creek where she lived married but as chaste as God had made her. “Untouched!” crowed the pastor’s wife. “If
you can imagine, and her husband must be passing strange.” Bringing forth the biscuits she had made for the occasion, Missus Dougherty went on to say, “The preserves are mine, dear friends, but the butter was fanned by an angel’s wings. A talking angel, apparently.”

“Since when?” Missus Jones wanted to know. “I know that creek pretty good, I should think, and no such being has yet spoke to me.”

Each of the five ladies who had gathered in the modest parlour put a pat of the butter on a biscuit. Each of them took a bite. “It is,” Missus Sharpe then offered, “unlike other butters. Isn’t it?”

“It’s heavenly,” said Missus Craig decisively and added, “Must be a Jersey cow. It was my husband who surveyed that land. And the creek.” She nodded solemnly.

Missus Dougherty said, “We’ll call it Heavenly Butter.”

“Is that sacrilegious?”

“It’s an adjective, Missus Craig.”

“Healing and Heavenly. That might be better.”

“She could start a going business.”

Missus Jones fanned herself impatiently.

Missus Fox stood up. “Well, I’ll say it right out. This is plain Dickinson mischief, is all it is. First, he bought the land from Mister Jones to squeeze us out and now Mister Dickinson and his little wife bought out Mister Shoffert and have us surrounded on all sides. Next he took our water access that you sold to him!” She directed a glare at Missus Jones. “And now this, about spirits! Ghosts in our water. As if any Christian could believe such heathen hokum meant only to scare us off our place altogether.”

Missus Sharpe said with an edge in her voice, “An angel would not scare a Christian.”

Missus Jones said, “You have the accessing to water, Missus Fox, and why should they want to scare a good neighbour away, if it is a good neighbour?”

Missus Dougherty began to fear that her party was dissolving in acrimony. She shook a finger at the gathered ladies to show her disappointment, but Missus Fox would not be stopped. “So as to get our land, which is smack in the middle of what they got from your husband and that Mister Shoffert, who has got no wife.”

Missus Jones, the good German immigrant, looked at Missus Fox without a blink. She picked up her coffee, which was weaker in body than she liked, and took a good swallow of it to calm herself. What she knew of her Quaker neighbours was too little to make any meaning of their designs, but she had sometimes considered their plight with sympathy and now she put her cup in its saucer with a little clatter.

“They are stealing my house girl too!” said Missus Fox to prove her point.

Missus Dougherty said firmly, “Surely not. Missus Dickinson is raising up five orphans. She needs all the help we can provide.”

“She has such an uncomplicated temperament,” said Missus Sharpe cheerily. “I find it hard to imagine she has motives.”

“And it’s such nice butter,” said Missus Craig.

“Made in a churn that was mine until last Sunday,” Missus Dougherty noted, with a hint of warning to the doubters. “And I’m set to help her make a business of it. That was an inspired idea you had, Missus Craig.”

Later that day, the pastor’s wife took her buggy out to the Dickinson place, where the sight of three children playing listlessly in the hot shade confirmed the sympathy she had felt for the stepmother. The girl had taken on this horde while denying herself her husband’s embrace.
Unspoiled
, she had said of
herself. Chaste. And there she was on the very milking stool that had stood in the Dougherty shed unused for more than a year. Mister Dickinson was sawing a board and a darkie was shaving shingles by the unfinished house. A lump of infant lay in a hammock under a tree and a lass with dirty hair, stringy and uncombed, was chopping at the carcass of a rabbit that lay on a board across her knees. None of this was immediately surprising to Missus Dougherty, but she saw that there was no proper house and noticed that the family was entirely bereft of adults except for the young father, since even the darkie was merely a tall, limping boy.

She had come in a buggy and was still sitting in it when Daniel put down his saw and approached. An odd fellow, she thought, to marry a girl so young, who can hardly be useful to him. Missus Dougherty allowed Daniel to help her out of the buggy, saying that she wished only a few scant words with his wife. Holding her skirt up in one hand, she said, “I mistook her for a child, Mister Dickinson, but I was wrong in that.”

Daniel brought her over to Ruth and left them together, and Missus Dougherty told Ruth that she was making up a stack of waxed papers for the sale of Ruth’s butter and that she was lettering these papers with the words
HEALING & HEAVENLY
.

Ruth was surprised. She then said she thought she had seen the angel again, but when she blinked her eyes for a second, it flew away.

“But what does she look like?” asked Missus Dougherty, putting fingertips to her throat.

“Oh, I can’t say.” Ruth took her hands off the cow’s teats and put them in her lap. Closing her eyes and raising her face, she made her voice whispery. “Speak out … You feel a longing …” She opened her eyes and looked at the pastor’s wife, who touched Ruth first on her shoulder, then on the thick, dark
hair that covered her neck. Ruth’s teeth were crossed over each other in front, but the effect was not unpleasant to Missus Dougherty’s way of thinking. “This one cow can make a scant amount of butter,” she said, “but when cream is brought from other parts and churned and chilled in your creek, it can be sold back to the customer who brought it. Don’t you see, dear, that your creek and the butter it chills are blessed?”

T
hat first Virginia summer, the days had been fused together as one long series of hours brought by the early rising sun and ended by the song of cicadas. The ground had at first refused to welcome its new tenants and then spread itself with corn wherever Ruth planted it. Lashed to the stalks, vines grew beans and squash, and by mid-September a small patch of wheat was ready to be cut with a scythe. Birds sang out on low and high branches, deciding whether to stay or move farther south. Trees
crowded close around the log house protectively. The sycamores rustled above it, their trunks fat with age while in the surrounding forest the trees put on a thickness of leaves that moistened the air and made a canopy so dense that no sun came through to warm the ground. In that deep shade, Simus taught Mary to recognize mushrooms, huckleberries, and fox grapes as well as sheep sorrel and poke. For a while it felt eternal, the safety Mary found under the sheltering canopy, and the other children ran freely in the woods looking for wild onions and leeks and these mixed well with the rabbits Simus brought down with snares and killed with a sharp blow between long, soft ears. Every afternoon Mary brought out the slate on which she had written words with a moistened fingertip. Pig.
Rabbit. Achilles. Pegasus
, and, of course,
Onesimus
, for he was the hero of a story she was helping him create. It was the story of a boy who would one day be free, reading and writing, also walking wherever he wished. The first Onesimus had found a kind person to educate him and now the second Onesimus would be the same.