The Purchase (14 page)

T
hat evening, while Ruth was churning the new cream in the cool air, Mary slid out of the house in the velvet-trimmed dress. “Look here, Ruth Boyd, and see what my papa bought me.”

“You seem to be steppin on its hem.”

Mary swirled around, throwing a moon shadow across Ruth’s churn. “I can just tie it up with a sash.” She looked down at herself. “It’s odd that Papa bought it, though, since indigo is made by slaves and Friends are not allowed it.” She held the skirt in both hands and examined it. “Maybe Papa doesn’t mind that now.… ” Her voice trailed off.

Ruth moved the paddle. “Better wait til you’re growed to wear it.”

“I
said
I can just wear a sash and tie it up.” Mary looked at Ruth coldly. “There’s a way to make butter come fast, but I guess you don’t know it.”

“My butter comes just fine.”

Mary began swirling. She got the skirt of the blue dress in a spin so that her bloomers were showing. “Come, butter, come!” She clicked her heels. “Peter’s waiting at the gate. For a butter cake.” She dipped, lifted her arms up over her head. “Come, butter, come.”

Ruth said, “Oh, I do feel it thicken, my Lord, yes.”

Mary came closer, surprised to hear the Lord’s name taken in vain.

“My Lord!” said Ruth again. “It’s comin so fast now it’s a plain miracle.” She jerked her arms up and down. “Try it for yourself.” She let go of the paddle and sat back, glad to straighten her shoulders and rest her arms while Mary grabbed the paddle and thrust it up and down.

“I did not even feel it before,” Mary said sharply, “so how am I to know?”

Ruth said, “Well, this butter business is growing so busy I might need a partner to share the profit if I could find someone qualified. Do you know a thing more about butter than for a rhyme?” She looked at the dress and pulled her eyes away, for the sight hurt her strangely.

“I am too occupied with everything a
mother
should be doing, Ruth Boyd.”

“Down in the timber lot all day.”

“Why not have Simus for your partner? You only need someone to churn for you and wrap butter in bits of waxed paper. It’s nothing.”

“And he’s surely underworked, lying on his back with his feet up while a girl who should know better carries his food to him.”

“Maybe you don’t like him because he reminds you of being our servant, Ruth Boyd. But if he had a paying job, he could buy his freedom.”

“It is the definement of a slave to work with no pay. And why should I care to lose him now that he can get up and walk and do for us as he should?” A whippoorwill called out the end of day from the ancient, unstoppable forest. They were far from other people, other families. It was that first summer of sewn-together days.

“K
ill the hog as the days turn cold,” Simus said. “First we to hoist him up on a rack and later the meat kin sit in salt and we to wash it down and coat it good to hang bove a fire of hickry chips.” It was the longest speech the boy had ever made.

So. They would hang the meat, salt it, and render the lard. They would pray for a cold winter to keep the meat from spoiling. It would make for a celebration of their first year in Virginia, but they must make a place for butchering where a hog could be hung high enough to be gutted. Explaining this, Simus pointed out that the pigs had been the best investment the Dickinsons could have made. “Costn no teng,” he said. “And grub fer free.”

Daniel did not like to say what he had paid for the pigs, but he was bound to admit he knew nothing of butchering or salting or smoking.

Simus said, “Leavm ta me for I kin do all an make soap an tallow for the missus.”

As if the gods had no hand in this, the four pigs continued to snort and scramble in the woods, bumping and chasing and squealing with pointed ears upright. Their mottled skins were camouflage. They came back to the hut each night replenished, and Simus found comfort in their snorts and firm bellies but Daniel now ordered the children to stay away from the pigs
and out of the timber lot, wanting no sentiment when it came to butchering.

“But, Papa,” Isaac argued, “Hiram and Martha and Corry and Bathsheba are my friends. They will be sad if I don’t come down to visit as I always do and it is bad for pigs to be sad. What if they forget to eat?”

Hiram. Corry. Daniel asked who had named the pigs. He was up early putting shingles on the roof of his house. “Isaac, you must wean yourself of connection to the animals, as they are all to be eaten one of these days. That is their purpose. In a few days, your Hiram will be butchered so that we may survive the winter. You must not consider the animals over yourself. It is God’s plan for us to have dominion and not to live among the beasts as friends. Would you climb up here and help me with the roofing?”

Isaac thought of Hiram’s round snout and the pink lining of his ears. He thought of the long face and pocketed eyes, which blinked at him. He tried not to cry, but the pain in his chest was more than he could bear without tears and he let them roll out of his eyes and down his cheeks. For the first time, his father had invited him to participate in a thing he had desperately wanted all summer – to be part of the house building. Now, if he climbed up to feel the new roof under his boots, to look down the chimney hole, to look out beyond the lot and the road, he would be agreeing to the murder of his friend. His father had laid a trap for him and scaling the wall of the house would mean that he could never complain. Then he wondered, How much would it help Hiram if he turned away from his father now? And if he couldn’t help Hiram, was an act of defiance worth the loss of that rooftime vantage?

In the meadow, Simus was building a hog hoist, stopping occasionally to gaze at his hut, for within it there had been a visitor the night before. “My life was once safe,” Bett had told him when he asked about her past. “In the first house, I played with my mistress’s children and never thought about it twice. My grandmother schooled me to read and write and heal the sick.”

Simus had asked if their people were the same.

“I cannot tell,” she answered quietly. “My grandmother came from a land she called Guinea, where she was kidnapped.” Then, while she checked the wound on his leg and the strength of the bone she had knit back together, she told him of the place she lived now and the trouble she knew there. Only a little time they’d spent like that for soon enough she had taken her shortcut back, moving fast out of fear. Otherwise, as she said, there would be no breakfast on the stove making its goodness felt, no clothes being pulled out of the cupboard for the children to wear, no Bible set out for Mister Fox to read out loud to his family. She told him this too: that the two girls were under her direction, along with the cleaning of the house, the laundering and cooking, the mending and spinning. And when there was sickness in the quarters, she was sent out to the fields to make the workers well, for her grandmother had died a little time ago. Gone all night! Not come back! That’s what they would say if she stayed and what would then happen was not to be imagined, she had said, although he knew enough about such things. She had to get back, but Simus could gaze at the hut where he lived in wonderment that it had been ever so briefly shared.

Mary went on with her teaching, and Isaac tended the pigs, and Benjamin and Jemima, still too young to wander, stayed close
to Ruth, who had the care of sickly Joseph and the garden and the chickens and Tick, the good cow, as well as the fast-growing butter business. Sometimes she took herself down to a certain place on the bank of the creek to wait for encouragement, but the shivering angel never came.

O
ne bright afternoon in October, Jester Fox rode up to the Dickinson house in a roll of red dust. Daniel had put up a second notice at the trading post and he listened to the hoof beats on his road, hoping it was his north-side neighbour come at last.

Acreage for sale. Inquire D. Dickinson Wilderness Road

As Daniel stood forth, Jester Fox arrived with angry shouts. “Come down here, you land-grabbin-sonofaweasel!” The horse foamed and snorted.

Daniel had turned sheet white and was already wringing his hands. He had been piling up stones, intending to speak to this neighbour about his chimney as well as the Shoffert land. It was imperative, now that autumn had come, to finish the house and create a source of heat.

“Your nigger bigged my house girl!” Fox bellowed. He grabbed his hat, crushed it in his hands, and began beating it against his leg while the gelding pawed at the ground and pranced, pulled at the mouth by hard-held reins.

“Surely not,” Daniel croaked. “Onesimus lives close by, with an injured limb, which would never carry him as far as your place.” He wanted to say, Nor would he do such a thing, but
he found that he wasn’t sure of that. His hands now dangled at his sides. His heart was fast. His small sons were hiding under the porch near his feet. He must stop shaking and find some authority within, although he had no idea where to look for it.

Fox shouted, “Tha
limb
must be mended good enough to climb on a girl and fornicate her!” and went on hitting his leg with the crumpled hat and biting his red moustache.