The Purchase (13 page)

Simus had usually done a bit of hunting by the time Mary arrived and in his turn he taught her how to snare and pluck a woodcock and catch catfish and trout. Out of sight of her father, she unbuttoned her boots, took off her stockings, and stood in the clear water of the creek, using her bare hands or a piece of net. The fish were creaturely and they brushed against her ankles and caught the light as she lifted them up in the net Simus had fashioned and the water ran off the mesh and the fish twisted inside it and she was happy for the first time since her mother had died, listening to Simus as she had never listened to anyone else. Under the falls there was a deep pool with hidden, circling bass and Simus showed her how to fish for them with a bamboo pole and a small frog as bait. He told her to wade in up to her waist and spin the hook and line and play the fish
if he bit. And sometimes she would return to the house with this treasured catch and Ruth would fry it in a pan over the fire while Simus lay in his crooked hut thinking of the words he had learned and the stories she had told him that day as reward for his interest. “The first Onesimus belonged to a slave owner named Philemon until finally he ran away. But one day he went out walking in the open and he met Paul the evangelist, who made him a Christian by teaching him. Paul wrote a letter to Philemon the slave owner, who was very angry that his slave had escaped. In his letter, Paul said, Dear Philemon, I send Onesimus back to you, but not as a slave. I send him back as my
brother
, sincerely Paul. At the very bottom of the letter her wrote, If he owes you anything, please just charge that debt to me.”

Simus loved these words. He had heard them spoken by his mama and he never tired of them. Sometimes he’d say, “What it mean, you think?” so that Mary would say that Onesimus was such a good man that the apostle Paul had made him a brother.

“But Paul a white man?”

“Nevermind about that.”

“Why Onesimus go back to Philemon then?”

“Because he belonged …” Mary stumbled over this.

Mary felt older and wiser, as if she had read the entire
Aeneid
in Latin, although that was an impossibility since there was no one to teach her. When she told Simus the story of Aeneas, she
invented a family in Dido’s city of Carthage with a son named Onesimus and a daughter named Mary. Simus listened closely. His long eyelashes fluttered as he watched Mary’s hands clutch her dusty slate. She was a girl who knew precious things, but until he met her, she had never run on the grass on her own bare feet. She had never climbed a tree or jumped off a rock, but now she had such pleasures and now he could read what her licked finger wrote on the slate. He’d say to Isaac and Benjamin that they should go and watch after the pigs.

Only one trouble with that.

Like Simus, Isaac was afraid of the timber lot, where a bear could appear or a wolf. He liked better to be with Simus, who sometimes carved out a bow for him and made good sharp arrows. Simus would tell him to go on now and look after the pigs, and when Benjamin ran back to the house to help Mama Ruth, Isaac would have to go off alone into the trees and underbrush. When Simus told him to watch for a boar that might be tempted by the sows, Isaac was surprised. What about Hiram, he wanted to know, who had fattened on acorns and hickory nuts and chestnuts and pawpaws and persimmons and might like to be a father? Simus had begun to feed Hiram a small allowance of corn, justifying this to Ruth by explaining that the meat would be fatter and the renderings would make better shortening. They must not be in too great a hurry to butcher, however. “He a brother and not to mix,” he explained to Isaac, thinking of the story Mary had told him of the prodigal son, although it did not apply. He wondered if a sister could be prodigal. Could a girl run away? He knew nothing of his mother’s life, of her beginnings or couplings. He knew nothing of women or girls but what he had learned by watching Mary, although now and then Bett came to see him secretly and they lay together and spoke their stories, but he knew girls to be as different from boys as
his kind were from white people or as horses were from pigs. He knew also that a brother and sister, whether pig or horse or human, should never mate.

Ruth noted the growing worth of the pigs and gave Simus his way. Her garden was flourishing but when her second crop of corn was almost full-headed, a week of rain caused the kernels to mildew and she picked three bushels before the heads were ripe and begrudged what was given to Hiram. The coins she was earning with her butter were needed for building supplies, but she bought six chickens and watched them grow while she churned. Jemima built towns for the chickens and Benjamin kicked at the towns and made them collapse, but in Ruth’s eyes no one loved Benjamin enough or understood his needs and she always told Jemima not to tempt her brother with those improvised towns and to go play by herself. “Build your house not on sand but on rock,” she would say, wondering about her own log house.

Daniel had cut down two saplings and driven them into holes in one wall about two feet from the floor to create a bed. Supporting the saplings with posts, he had laced them with pieces of hemp rope back and forth, side to side, and at last the family moved out of the lean-to and into the unfinished house. It was unfinished because it lacked a chimney and fireplace, but the new sapling bed was occupied at night by Ruth and Jemima and Mary, while Daniel and Isaac and Benjamin slept in the loft and Joseph lay in the cradle because he could still not crawl out. Often enough, Benjamin climbed down the narrow ladder to sleep nuzzled by his stepmother and Jemima was pushed aside. It seemed that neither Benjamin nor Jemima missed their mother or even remembered her. What they missed was something comforting they couldn’t imagine or specify.

In the new bed, Mary whispered the prayers she had been taught by her Quaker mother and Ruth muttered the prayers
she’d been taught at the Methodist almshouse. Mary prayed for Simus. Sometimes she prayed for her mother or to her mother, she didn’t know which. Ruth prayed for Tick, who continued to give rich milk although she had not been bred in a year. She thanked the Lord for the new bed, which was the only piece of furniture Daniel had built other than the table. At mealtimes, the children sat on the floor with bowls in their laps. They needed a window frame and glass, a door and a latch. Two bowls had been broken and should be replaced but it was no good talking to the Lord about that. It was no good talking to Daniel either, since his mind was full of stones and the plan and description of the chimney still to be built. He had not sold any of the Shoffert land because buyers were using old warrants handed out by the government and only cash would redeem Miss Patch. He had tied a notice to a roadside tree,
For Sale Good Acres, D. Dickinson
, believing Jester Fox would see it and be tempted. Daniel needed that neighbour’s help now in the building of a good drawing chimney.

Sand or rock. How did the log house sit?

There were people in the new town of Jonesville who desired to put a bare hand or foot in Ruth’s holy creek. Missus Craig brought her mother in a cart and splashed the old woman’s arthritic legs. Missus Dougherty sent a visitor who had complained of headaches and Ruth led him down through the timber lot to a spot under the cottonwoods where she told him to keep his eyes shut tight. “Don’t look up at her,” Ruth said, “or she might never come back.” News began to travel on the Wilderness Road, and once in a while an emigrant would stop at the log house and ask about the healing water. Simus therefore hollowed out a log and dragged it up to the roadside and filled it with a wooden dipper and a pail full of creek water. He put a small handmade basket for coins near the log with a sign
that was to read,
Holy Water
, except that the
W
was upside down and looked like an
M
so the sign read,
Holy Mater
and Daniel flung the pail across the road, saying it was Popish.

There were visitors who asked for a packet of butter, but most of Ruth’s supply was taken to Missus Dougherty in the wagon, which Ruth drove by herself now since Daniel had given her lessons with horse and lines. Her trips took place just after dawn, when the light was soft and the butter could be kept cool and damp and when the cream brought by her customers to Missus Dougherty would not sour on the long return trip.

One morning Ruth stopped at Mister Murray’s trading post on her way home. It seemed very bold to get down from the wagon, leaving six jugs of cream covered by a wet cloth and shade. It seemed bold to enter the post by herself, but she had a dollar tucked into her waistband that she’d collected from Missus Dougherty along with a new idea. “I want a dozen jars,” she announced too loudly, unaccustomed as she was to making any kind of purchase. And Mister Murray stepped out of his dark room at the back of the store, moving a curtain aside to make his entrance. It was a moment of triumph for Ruth, who would put up vegetables for the winter at Missus Dougherty’s suggestion. “Twelve,” she said, to be precise.

Mister Murray scanned his customer’s small frame, one eye glinting behind a monocle. He said he would bring the jars out to her wagon in a carton. The cost of the jars, he said, was fourteen cents.

Ruth did not want to show him the cash hidden inside her waistband, so she turned away, pretending to be interested in his window display when her eyes fell on what looked like a large doll in the window wearing a soft blue dress. Each blue sleeve bore two stripes of velvet and the skirt had three velvet stripes above its hem. Ruth looked at the doll, which was
painted and unrealistic. Who would play with such a thing? Then she smiled, realizing that this doll was only there to wear the dress, which must be for sale. How would it be to wear such a dress with its full skirt and velvet stripes? Would she look like a married woman? Would such a dress erase the pity from Missus Dougherty’s eyes? She stretched out an arm impulsively, although the doll was well out of reach.

“Not for sale, miss,” the storekeeper said. “That frock is put there only to exemplify the use of the fabric I purvey.”

Imagining the weight of that fabric swirling around her legs, Ruth angled her face toward the storekeeper and allowed as how she had not much time to look but might she examine this article of clothing made not to be worn but to be instructive.

“Yes, but it would not do for me to sell the dress, miss, lest how would the customers find inspiration for the cloth they purchase?” Mister Murray crossed the small open area of the store and put both hands on the garment his wife had so artfully fashioned. He was remembering that this was the girl who made the butter his wife bought from the pastor’s wife. “Mustn’t to wrinkle it up,” he said with a smile that was kind enough as he lifted the large wooden doll down from the ledge. Then, more kindly, “Your sales in butter go well enough these days, do they?”

Ruth said the Lord had provided the cow and the creek and the churn and she was thankful. She did not mention the angel, since she still had not followed her instructions, not knowing what words she was meant to speak out. Perhaps she had failed in her part of the bargain and the butter was no longer graced, but that would be a disappointment to her customers. What she did say was that there was none of them could sew a stitch in her house, and if Mister Murray would perhaps let her buy this dress that was already fading in his window … if he would do that then, even though the dress be sun-bleached, he would
have a person to be walking around in it to show at church and two pounds of butter to keep or sell. “I’d display it better’n a doll ever could,” Ruth said. “And cover up the sun mark with a handkerchief.”

“Sun-bleached?”

Ruth pointed. “It don credit the fabric,” she said.

He thought she was, after all, a young lady who was forthright and brave and that good Missus Dougherty had taken her on as a cause, saying she was selected by the Lord to take charge of a passel of motherless orphans. Perhaps then, adorning her in a dress from his window would be somewhat of a Christian act and Missus Murray could make up another window dress within the week. “I guess one-half a Virginia dollar could make it yours,” he agreed.

Ruth asked him to wrap the dress, gave him her money, and left the store in a rush, forgetting the jars and driving off in a clatter of wheels and hooves. She had never bought anything for herself. Not a dress. Not a cape. Not even the black straw hat or the felt cap she wore every day. She had been given those things as second-hand goods and if in truth she had been trained to sew and mend, there was no time now for honesty about such things. She would have a Sunday dress to look like a married wife.

The package safely stowed, she slapped Mulberry with the reins and let her trot when they got to the edge of what passed for a town – Mister Murray’s store, two log houses, and a forge just built. There was the land for a courthouse given by Mister Jones, a good man and provider of tools. Ruth made her way home with the cream to be churned and the dress to be worn and rounded the last bend standing up in the wagon with the long lines of the hitch in her hands. Then she saw Daniel and sat down fast. She had spent money that could have been put to the return of his horse or to buying more nails, or even to window
glass. Ruth pulled to a halt and grabbed the package and threw it into a tall patch of weeds as the wagon rolled on past. Some of those weeds had been earlier mashed by wheels, but most of them stood up straight for a hiding place and Daniel was even then coming to help her carry the jars of cream.

“What is that?” He was pointing.

Ruth’s mind jumped around.

“There, over in the weeds?” He walked back in the path of the wagon and bent over the paper package.

“It’s a secret,” Ruth said hastily, turning her voice to a whisper and climbing down. She averted her face, which was flushed. Her eyes had been bright in the wagon, but they faded and she brushed at the air. “Isaac said to me that Mary has just turned fourteen. I thought a dress could be a present from her papa.”