The Purchase (19 page)

The days grew colder, and Jemima and Benjamin began to bang on the lean-to door begging for admittance. Even Isaac now and then wanted to come in. The little shack felt crowded when they were all there and Mary wondered how the family had ever lived in it, but she did not turn the children away because their childish antics eased her grief and she sometimes agreed to tell them a story. Most of the space in the lean-to was taken up by that first bed Daniel had made large enough for several sleeping people. The rest was covered by heaps of drying roots so that the children had to step around them carefully. On the walls, there were plants and gourds and bits of softened bark, but the little fire Bett kept burning on the ground was comforting as there was still no fire in the cold log house.

Mary positioned the three children on the bed, backs to the wall, reminding them that once they had lived in a house with furniture and a German stove and a spinning wheel. She told them that Isaac had gone off every day to school and she began to tell them the story of Aeneas, thinking it would keep her mind occupied. “In this story,” she told the children, showing them a picture pasted in the front, “the hero has a perilous journey.” She liked the word and said it again. “Perilous. Because he is running away from his enemies.” She looked at Bett.

“A hero does not run away,” Isaac announced.

“Troy has been conquered by the Greeks and some of the Trojans are going off with Aeneas in ships to find a place where they can be free and Juno is making trouble for them because of a prophecy.”

“In Africa,” Bett murmured.

“What is prophecy?” asked Benjamin.

“Very like a promise,” Mary said, but she remembered asking her mother why the prophecy had been false and suddenly her eyes filled with hot tears. If only her mother could come back and explain everything.

“More forecast than promise,” said Bett, waving her spoon, and Mary thought of the bedtime ritual when her mother waved her brush and let Mary braid her long hair. “When Juno made a storm, all but seven ships sank and the Trojans sailed for seven years looking for a new homeland,” she said.

“Who is Juno?” Benjamin asked.

“Remember?
For what offence the Queen of Heaven began to persecute so brave so just a man
 …” But she stopped then, for there were such pictures jumping in her head that she put her hands over her eyes.
So brave, so just a man
. Simus had not said a word in his own defence when they dragged him away. Now she and Bett were locked together in a secret and the thought of her mother brought only pain and she turned her thoughts to Luveen, who had raised her as gently as any mother but who had sometimes let Mary bring Caroline Corbett into the kitchen to fashion tiny cakes for a family of fairies who lived under the stairs and hung upside down when they slept. It was Luveen she needed.

Bett was telling the boys that her own people had wandered in search of a homeland too. “There was a war between the forest people and a band of invaders from the savanna, but it all happened such a long time ago that there is no reckoning when.” Isaac and Benjamin had never heard Bett say more than a few words and they listened with different reactions. Benjamin thought she was nice to his sister, who was always sad now, and Isaac thought she had married Simus because they were matching in colour. He wondered how she had come all the
way from Africa to Virginia, but Bett was still telling her story. “Those mixed people,” she was saying, “were so changed by being together that they had to leave the first homeland and they wandered
far
to build a new city that would hold them and they called that place Ife and time folds and unfolds around it still.” She smiled, remembering her grandmother telling about Oduduwa, who had led the people on that journey, and who had seven grandchildren who founded seven states, but she could not name the grandchildren or the states so she asked Mary if she would open her father’s book and read to them, “Please.”

Mary borrowed the book from her father then and opened it.
Arms and the man I sing
 … remembering the night she had asked her mother why Achilles had been a hero to the Greeks when he had hidden in his tent and let them fight without him. It was a fair question, but her mother had given her that steely look that followed most of Mary’s questions. “There is always an argument in thee, Mary,” she had said, taking Isaac into her arms and kissing his shaggy head. “Achilles is my hero
because
he refused to fight. He came out of his tent only when his best friend was killed by Hector.” Mary had once mentioned this moment with her mother to Simus.

“Why Achil drag Hector behind his war chariot if he so fine a hero then?” he had asked. “Hector so brave he never even cry out.”

“Ah, kil, eeze,” Mary had corrected in her teacherlike voice. But now she had the terrible thought that Simus had let himself be taken without a cry of protest because of Hector’s silence. She had never bothered to explain that Hector was already dead when Achilles dragged him around the battlefield. Horrified, she threw down the book and jumped to her feet. “I will read no more of heroes,” she told her brothers bluntly, and their pleas did not change her mind. She had given Simus false ideas
of bravery. Worse than that was the knowledge that she had stood by her father and watched Simus be dragged away, an act of such cowardice that she could not even bear to think of it. Sending the children back to the house, she lay on the lean-to bed and stared at the wall.
Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father
. “Why did Simus die,” she asked Bett, “if God decides?”

Bett came to sit by her. The pieces of Onesimus she had been given by Daniel were buried along with a white bird she had caught and bled. She had buried his bowl and spoon under that hut where he lived as they were the last things he had touched, and also the shingle knife, although she would not speak of this. “Onesimus is with us. I have seen to it.”

“What of the other one?” Mary hid her face.

“Him we don’t want lingering. Put him away from you.”

“I cannot.”

“Then come out with me tonight and I will show you what to do.”

Mary closed her eyes and dreamed that her mother was holding Simus, running her hands through his wiry hair. When she woke, she lay in the dark, counting backwards all over again. Two sparrows. And one of them shall not fall.

It was bitter that night, but Bett led Mary shivering in her mother’s shawl out to the forest, where she told her to find an animal small enough to kill. It might take much time. She must not snare it or trap it. She must call it to herself even if it took many hours. Mary had gone back to the log house after the small sleep and the hard dream. She had taken supper and gone to bed and then gone out quietly after dark when everyone in the house was asleep. Now she walked through dead leaves and hoarfrost,
kicking at bushes and sometimes even crawling on hands and knees to inspect the ground for something to kill. What she found was nothing but a mole, blind and easy to catch, and Bett gave her a needle and told her to let its blood run out of its tiny neck and say, “You will not come back.” All that time, during the walking and crawling and waiting for the mole, Bett had stayed by Mary, and when the killing was done, she pulled her up like an old woman wobbly on her legs and walked her back to her father’s house for what was left of the night.

T
he next morning, while Daniel was crouched over the wagon hitch, Mary came toward him moving with the slow, automatic gait that was usual to her now so that she seemed to be sleepwalking. “I must speak … of Bett.”

Daniel did not look up. He had just then been talking to himself with some severity, reminding himself that the girl must be returned to the widow Fox, for two months had gone swiftly by and the girl was no longer a runaway but a fugitive. He would take her back in the wagon, for she was heavy with child, and convince the widow to be lenient, reminding her of the mercy shown to the prodigal son.

“Papa? Are you listening?”

“Not now, child. I am busy with my own thoughts.” He found it hard to look at Mary and moved farther under the wagon with his face averted, running his long fingers over the hitch, which needed attention from the blacksmith although every dollar Ruth earned was being saved for Miss Patch. Repairs could wait; he had traded his horse for a boy and the thought of what had occurred through that purchase so horrified him that he fought against it day and night. Horse for a boy. It was ludicrous and obscene. I must take the girl home, he told himself, and after that speak to the auctioneer, who will hear me and grant a reprieve. He raised his head then and met his daughter’s
eyes. “I am going to speak to Julia Fox and appeal to her sense of Christian mercy.”

Mary howled, “Bett can never go back there! She is … she has … will soon have a baby and is so frightened of those murdering boys that she is afraid to set foot outside in the sunlight! If we send her back I could never be happy again. If anything should happen to her, oh, what then?” Mary was winding her skirt in her hands. “But … I had the idea,” she went on modestly, “that we might ask the widow to make an exchange.”

“An exchange?” Daniel noticed that Mary was wrapped in a warm shawl of her mother’s and it pained him to see it so ragged. “An exchange of what?”

“For Simus. Because they killed him.”

Daniel crawled out from under the wagon and pushed himself up to a sitting position with his legs spread on the ground. “You think Julia Fox owes us a
slave
?” He bit down on the word.

“Bett would be so grateful to us.”

“I do not want the girl, Mary Amelia. Nor her gratitude.”

“You do not want the girl
to die
, do you, Papa? And yet you alone can save her.” Mary’s lips trembled. She wiped her eyes with a fist. “I could sell her medicines.” Mary looked sideways at her father. “We could pay the widow that way. Now and then. To keep Bett here with us.”

Daniel stared at the sycamore trees that stood like sentinels behind her. “We saw the result of my last purchase, Mary,” he muttered, fiddling with the hitch again, shoving it away and then pulling it against his chest. “Thee has a life ahead that must have no such regret.”

“When we have paid the full price, we will free her. We will not own her for more than an hour.” With the toe of her boot, Mary made a slow circle on the ground.

“Bett could not make enough potions in two lifetimes,” Daniel stammered.

“They are not potions, Papa.” Mary reached for his hand. “And widow Fox doesn’t seem to care much for her. Perhaps the cost will not be so great.”

W
hen he dismounted in front of the widow’s white house, Daniel touched his hat, for Julia Fox had come out with her floured hands on her hips and he had forgotten his practised words. Speechless, he stood and looked at a woman who had been left with four children to feed in the wilderness of Jonesville. The door to the house was open enough that he could see the disarray within and hear the sounds of children squabbling and a dog whining as if unfed. “I do not see you at Prayer Meeting,” he finally managed, and she yelped, “What good is praying after what the Lord done me?”

Daniel considered this. The Lord is no agent, he wanted to say, but instead he announced that he had come about the missing girl.

“Missing!” the widow snapped. Her cap was askew and she straightened it and glared. “We know’d all along where she is.” She stared at him. “And if you intend to keepin her, you count me out ninety dollar right here or I am decided on selling her south to teach her a lesson better’n ta run away.”

Daniel repeated, “Ninety,” without a note of dignity because he had hoped for something feasible, something he could manage. Such as a simple exchange of milk and butter for the widow’s children. He looked down helplessly. “I have no wish to own the girl,” he said, “only to keep her safe. There has been far too much teaching of lessons already.”

This seemed to infuriate the widow. “Ninety, and you to give over her spawn when it’s growd enough to work.” She pointed a finger at her barn. “And a sow bred and bigged in this upcoming spring, which still ain’t enough to cover my loss.”