The Purchase (18 page)

“This’ll teach you to bash a white man’s head!”

Simus is thinking about Jesus and those thieves dying by His side. There was three altogether, he says to himself, without making a sound. Then he remembers how Bett told him the
story of Osanyin the healer, a god with only one arm, one leg, and one eye after his house fell down on him and how, because he was so injured, he needed the help of humans. She told him about Osanyin while she was mending his leg. And later, she told him again when he had injured his hand … 
Osanyin is African
, she said,
as we are
. For time uncounted, this story is there in his head. Then he considers Hiram the pig, set to be killed with the sharp end of a pole axe so that all there is left to do is to open the neck and lay it over a trough. A pig, after being killed, is scalded and scraped and hoisted up high enough to be gutted, but a boy is hung first, still alive. A boy is hung by his hands and left to rot. A boy is owned, like the pig, and has no right to decide his own circumstance. His past is unrecorded and his future is nobody’s guess. This is therefore not a murder because it is done to someone who cannot be deprived of what he does not own. Indeed, the boy will hang until his arms are pulled out of their sockets, and still his feet will never know the ground as a plant would define being free. He will hang until animals come to feed on him. He will not be found for three days and nights of looking and by then all of Bett’s herbs and unguents and potions will be useless except those concerned with the laying out of what corpse is left. There will be part of a leg, both shoulders, half a face.

But while he dissolves, he will also retrace.

He knows the ground he walked as a child in every molecule of his two feet, and while they dangle, they keep hold of their sensitivities and send messages up his legs to his brain. While they dangle, they roam the slave encampment by the Tennessee border with its ruts and ridges so heartfelt. They touch the prickly stubble behind old auntie’s cabin, where the ground grows something that opens and shuts, something that prickles and burns, and where the cook pot swings over its arid blur of
smoke. He stumbles on acorns and crawls into leaves that are almost clean what with smelling so dry and sharp. He hears old auntie’s shout and he goes on down to the riverbank, which is slick from the washtubs and white-bottomed feet. He lies on his chest and hears his heart pound soft against that ridge where tufts of waxy green emerge in the summer and the water’s taste is thick like meat. He holds his face up over that taste and puts his tongue down to it, thinking of the wild animal he had once seen doing this.

For a while, long or short depending, he spins and then hangs solitary, tongue and feet tasting, first watching the land and trees revolve and finally seeing only a slice of it out of a slice of one eye. The main image, recurring, has been the trunk of the locust tree, which is thicker than one man or even two men and possibly thicker than three. Each time he sees it in his revolution, it seems thinner, two boys, then none and the gorse bushes all along the edge of the field and the fallen-down trees covered by errant, roaming weeds. Spinning, he’s frightened to the point of terror at not knowing what will be next; but hanging, he becomes philosophical. He has been sacrificed. To save Mary.

He dangles and thinks more and more of the tree, the span of its trunk contrasting with the branches that are meagre like his arms. The trunk is strong, but the life of the tree is shallow in the skin, as is the life of a slave. The tree will not read or write and neither will the slave. The tree will feel its past in its roots, which are stuck hard in the ground, but the present is there too, in the dangling feet of a boy, like ants in the blood. When he runs out of water, his insides will shrivel and his brain will shrink, but the ants will keep marching all the way to the gloss of the creek. The boy will not think clearly then, so he must think now of all the times he has been through and of what he can still know. There was the long ride he endured inside his
ma’s tight belly, and later a moment when she called out, Son! and he felt swelled up on that. Son! He thinks now of that word and remembers being with his brother in the stiff corn stalks by the well and how they built something of the stalks without cutting them, how they bent and wove those stalks like strong fellows and rested underneath, and he thinks next of a baby inside Bett and her touching the bare skin on her own bruised self and then his. And the baby is the same as he was inside the dark of his mother and maybe it is the thing he calls the dickens, for we are made in His image, and yet he longs now to understand His purpose. Soon I will know, he thinks, and his next thought is for Mary, who instructed him and befriended him and was pleasant in his company, even baring her clean feet and learning from him and that had been the best part of his life.

T
he house Ruth had helped her husband and the dead slave build was more or less finished but for the chimney, and now Daniel was doing his best to follow the measurements for a drawing flue in his worn manual while Ruth handed him one stone after another. Small Ruth, not but sixteen and never the mistress of anything but a butter churn and a china dish. Small Ruth, for whom there were such obstacles as a husband in name only and five unhelpful stepchildren. For Ruth, nothing had changed. But Mary had withdrawn from all of them. She kept company only with the fugitive slave girl, Bett. While she ignored her family and her household duties, Ruth milked the cow, carried the milk to the creek, skimmed it, and later carried it back to the house. She churned, she packaged, she delivered. She harvested what she had earlier planted. She fed Benjamin
his choice of edibles and kept the other children alive enough to live another day. When Bett left a tonic at the door for Joseph’s cough, Ruth threw it away because what slave knew a thing about medicine? At the almshouse, she had known someone dead of a fit brought on by a hoodoo remedy, and she knew that Bett had been doctoring Missus Fox when her fourth child was born with a squinty eye. When Bett moved herself up to the lean-to for warmer shelter, Ruth begged Daniel to send her back to the Fox place for good, saying, “She’ll bring trouble on us.”

As if they hadn’t had enough.

Daniel thought of nothing but the dead man lying at the edge of the creek and the boy dragged off later that day. In his mind, Jester Fox lay face down in the mud and Simus hung from the locust tree; it was one picture, always with him. He knew the details of the tree as if he had stood at its foot when Simus was lifted into it, instead of riding and walking and searching. He remembered the deep indentation on the back of his neighbour’s head as if he had put it there. One body on the ground and another in a tree. The image would not be erased. And those words:
You don hep me
. What did Simus mean? That he was incapable of helping? That he had caused all the hurt the boy was suffering. Or … was it a warning. You. Don’t help me. Because Simus was
letting
himself be taken? And again the picture of Mary kneeling over Jester Fox with Bett. And again the terrible thorny tree. He was worn down by a lack of sleep, but how could he sleep when he brooded over Joseph’s cough and his unredeemed mare and the unsold land and his corn that might be flattened any minute by rain. How could he sleep when he must try not to think about Jester Fox and the locust tree? At
night, he carried Joseph across the planks from one corner of the cabin to another, patting his little back to help him breathe and humming whatever lullaby he could find part of to remember.
Oh won’t you come along …

He had caught sight of Miss Patch pulling heavy loads to Elkenah Wynn’s new mill, her ribs showing between the straps of the harness, and he had felt such regret at the sight of her shivering frame that his own chest ached. It seemed to Daniel that everything had come from the trade of this horse for an innocent boy. All of it had come from that. He must go to the auctioneer and find a way to take her back.

But there was a runaway girl in his lean-to who could bring them all to ruin. “One of these days,” Ruth kept saying, “the widow Fox will come up this road to take back what belongs to her and you best be ready for trouble as she’ll put the law to her side.”

The law. What good could come of hiding a girl who was sooner or later to be found anyway? He must speak to his neighbour and argue convincingly on Bett’s behalf. So young, in such a delicate condition, he would say, reminding the widow of God’s example of mercy. He could not keep the girl. Ruth was partly right. There was Mary to consider, who was growing too attached. Ruth had seen the two girls walking hand in hand. “Like friends!” she’d exclaimed. And Mary did not go to the meadow or into the timber lot or down to the creek. The creek and the timber lot and the meadow – all of them – were avoided. At night, when Daniel climbed up the ladder and lay down beside his boys, Mary got up and crossed to the door and ever so quietly lifted the latch. Sometimes Daniel climbed down the ladder then and stood at the window and watched the dim glow of Mary’s lantern pass through the milk gap and into the night. He stood on the cold floor he had built by placing one board next to another across the beams like a bridge.

M
ary stayed close to Bett. She walked back and forth under the trees or stayed in the lean-to as the weather cooled, making herself count backwards. This before this before this, as if any of it could end differently.

At night, Bett went out collecting plants as if there might be a use for them. She hung them on the walls of the lean-to. She pressed oils from certain seeds and stored those oils in hollow gourds. When Mary asked questions about the plants, Bett told her about her grandmother and the Cherokee woman who had cared for the slaves at the Tidewater plantation where she had lived as a child. “The two of them, they used to wander all the way to the hills and nobody ever stopped them because they were known to be healers.” Bett was showing signs of the baby she carried inside, and she now and then put a hand on her belly and studied her friend who lay on the big bed for hours at a time.

“Did your grandmother teach you all this? I would like to learn.”

“I learn from the plants,” is all Bett would say, knowing her only value to this place. Her secrets must be kept. “There is the spirit of the plant and there is where it lives, whether in the root or the stem or the flower. Such knowledge cannot be taught in any usual way.” She had been accused of making magic once or
twice in the past. Witchcraft, a Tidewater neighbour had called it, because there is also knowing when a plant should be picked and whether it is to be crushed or boiled and such knowledge is rare.