The Purchase (26 page)

Isaac was always kind, even when Bry had refused to share the toy wagon Wiley had made. It was blue and had turning wheels and Benjamin had hidden it once, but Isaac had taken Bry to the cowshed and given it back and now he was going to show Bry where his father had died.

At the tree, when they came to it, Bry looked straight up for some time. When he looked down, he did not touch the small glass bottle or the coloured stone or the dirty ribbon at the base of the trunk because Isaac said they were never meant for living flesh. “How did he die?” Bry asked with his smallest voice.

“A man named Mister Fox beat your mama,” Isaac told him. “Then your pa pounced on Mister Fox and his boys killed your pa. For the pouncing.” The day was warm and Isaac looked at Bry, whose eyes were sad, and told him there was a pond nearby and maybe they should now proceed to look for it.

Pounced on him
, Bry thought. He said, “My pa would never be killed by just boys,” and felt the proud claim of that.

“Well, they hung him on this tree,” Isaac said, wondering if he might be going too far. Bry was only six and looked to be tired and somewhat upset. “And he never made any sound that I heard when they dragged him away and then they rode off and just left him here and he couldn’t get down.” He added, “Your pa wasn’t full grown either and there were three of them.”

Bry stood under the thorny tree, his hands on his narrow hips, forced to believe what Isaac said because the older boy had been there and seen all of it with his eyes. He said he had seen the boys come into the yard on their horses and he had seen one of them shoot off a gun. “And it was Benjamin who told them where to look for your pa,” Isaac said. “Just like Judas.”

Bry swallowed and kept still.

“Did you know him?” Isaac asked because he couldn’t remember clearly the order of events. And Bry said he talked to
his pa at night, although it wasn’t true. No one had told him about this father. With Isaac, he kicked the dirt and doubled up his fists, but later, lying in the lean-to bed and looking out on the very same moon that had shone down on the black tree through that dark night, he wondered how long it took … no water, he thought, and he cried into the pillow Mary had made for him. No one to sponge his lips like Jesus. He thought he would kill the two sons of Mister Fox when he was old enough and he wondered who the third boy had been because he would kill him too when he found out.

For many nights after that, the thought of his father burdened him, but the hours he spent awake in his bed were not wasted, for he used them to move his understanding forward bit by bit. Three boys had come into the yard on their horses. They had shot off a gun. They had made the horses prance around the yard on their iron feet and Benjamin had told them how to find the hut. Over and over he ran the words and images through his mind. Someday, he thought, I will do unto them as they did to my pa. He did not speak to Mary or Bett of this. It was his secret to hold hard to.

W
hen Bry turned seven, Bett took her son to the site of the fallen hut where Simus had lived and where she had buried the spoon and bowl and the shingle knife. No one had cleared the pile of thin logs away and she told him to take them up one by one and lay them out in a circle end to end. “Stars sometimes fall to earth,” she said. “And they must have a map.” She knelt in the centre of the circle and spread a red cloth on the ground, saying it was the cloth on which she had given him birth once before and this was to be the second time.

Bry looked at the cloth and backed away. He did not want to go into the mysterious place he had come from, wherever that was. He did not want to be born again on a cloth where Mama Bett was even now drawing a cross with the chalk she kept in her medicine bag. It was the kind of cross she drew on the ground in the woods, with circles at the end of each point, and at times like that she always acted strange.

Touching the sides of her son’s face with both hands, Bett told him to stand in the centre of the cross and call out to his father in a loud, clear voice. “By what name?” Bry asked, and she said, “Only call out ‘Father!’ ”

“But what is his name?” Bry would not take a step. He kept his eyes closed and she gave him a push so that he stood for a minute at the centre of the cross and then she pulled him to her
and gave him a red cloth bag that held five stones of various colours. She said his father had come for an instant while his eyes were closed, and now he had gone back to his death like great Oduduwa, the ancient father.

At the lean-to, Bry told Mary that he had called his father back to earth. Thinking he had done well to inform her, he spread his arms and hopped about, but Mary narrowed her eyes to slits and said it was wicked to say such a thing and even raised her hand before he ran outside and climbed a sticky pine and was gone for the rest of the day.

That evening, Mary entered her father’s house during the family meal to ask for help. “It is Bry’s seventh birthday,” she explained. “And I want him to know about Simus. That he was a Christian. Before he gets wrong ideas.”

“I want to come,” Jemima said, and Mary answered that Jemima would always want what she couldn’t have.

At that, Daniel stood up, pushed back his bench, and said that he and Jemima would forgo their peaches in order to visit the lean-to. Still chewing the last of his bread, he led his two daughters outside and along the narrow path through the milk gap, sure that Mary must be reproaching herself for speaking so coldly to Jemima since she was one to judge herself as harshly as she judged others. Supposing that she was suffering regret, he waited to hear an apology. But there was none forthcoming. Mary had become as unknown to him as the little lean-to he had built eight years ago, and he ducked his head and came through the narrow doorway to be assailed by a bitter smell, as if his memories clung to the splintered walls along with Bett’s plants: memories of his children cold and hungry and full of their separate fears; of freezing nights, with all of them stacked
like kindling on the bed while he slept alone in the wagon alongside a boy who lay on the ground in a pile of leaves. Bett was lighting a pinenut candle and its smoke brought tears to his eyes. “Why have you given Bry his name?” he had asked her once, and she had answered that it was for black bryony. “Which is poisonous,” he had said, and she had answered, “It also heals.”

Now his eyes moved to the wall, hung with its herbs, some of them no doubt poisonous and others perhaps healing. Wondering why he’d been asked to come, he noticed that Bry was sitting in a shadowed corner, fingering a small red bag.

Mary had put herself at the farthest wall and she stood quietly, with her hands clasped. “This being the anniversary of Bry’s birth,” she said, “I wish to tell him of his father and for that I ask my own father’s help.”

Daniel saw that she had grown to womanhood without his noticing and he suddenly missed the girl she had been.

“Now then,” she said, opening her old Barclay’s
Catechism
, “seeing it is by the spirit that Christ reveals knowledge of God, is it by the Spirit that we must be led?” She paused. “Bry, put aside that heathen bag.”

The child opened his mouth, but Daniel said quickly, “Ye are not in the Flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwells in thee.” It seemed an unusual way to introduce Bry to his father.

“Papa, it is for Bry to answer me,” Mary stated. “His father was a Christian and he must learn the responses.”

Daniel saw that Bett’s lips were moving and that Mary seemed not to notice.

“And as touching brotherly love?” Mary asked, peering at the open page.

“We are taught to love one another,” Bett said softly.

Mary glanced at her, frowning. In the dark, the lean-to was more pleasant than it ever was during the day, when all the cracks showed and the dirt floor was often covered with baskets and gourds, but Bett must understand that this world of theirs had grown too small. It was all about to change. “Bry, is it necessary for our salvation to keep the commandments?” she asked, staring now at the boy as if she would lay claim to him. This morning Wiley had said that Bry would have to stay in the lean-to with Bett. He thought that Bry was too wild to live in a house, but she would prove him wrong. He had said this after coming upon her lugging a pail of water from the creek. “I am building a house for you,” he had said, gazing at her upturned face.

Now Mary looked at her father, who remembered his Barclay’s after all these years. In the dim light, she could see grey strands in the hair at his temples and in the beard he had grown since Joseph’s death and she wondered how she had failed to notice these things when she had given such attention to another man’s face. She looked at Bett, who was sitting on the dirt floor in her faded dress staring at walls badly chinked, soiled with rain and mud and tears, and at Bry, who was still clutching the red cloth bag. She could not leave them behind. They must be always close.

The night was very still, without breeze. Mary was trying to create a mood, to inspire a seven-year-old child, but why? Daniel stared at Bett, whose hands lay on her tired dress. He had seen her make clothes for herself and her child out of remnants. He had seen her put Bry in the cast-off shirts of Benjamin or Isaac. But Mary was cleanly dressed in good grey linsey. The wool in its weft had come as a gift from Wiley Jones, who raised sheep with his father. His mother had spun it and woven the fabric as a gift. Daniel wondered then if he had been invited out to the lean-to so that Mary could make an announcement. Perhaps
this performance had nothing to do with Simus or Bry. Perhaps Mary wanted to fortify her position, to warn her parent, to ready him for a proposal by showing her maturity? Wiley Jones had been making weekly visits to the Dickinsons, bearing gifts. But Daniel did not like Wiley Jones, and wanting no confession of new faith from his daughter, he got to his feet and announced that he and Jemima should be off to their beds.

Mary stepped forward to take him by the arm. “Tell Bry there are no spirits in the woods, Papa. He must learn so that he can live in the world. I am going to teach him our Catechism. I will also teach little John.”

Daniel lifted the latch. “John will be Methodist.” He ducked under the lintel, and as he did so Bry ran streaming past.

“Blessed are they that do His commandments that they may have right to the tree of life,” Mary called after him.

“Your acolyte has escaped,” Daniel said dryly, letting the door slam.

The space between house and lean-to was so dark that he put out a hand to feel his way. “I wish you success in your efforts,” he called back, remembering his mother, who had trained him in the Catechism with a willow stick.

“Pappy,” said Jemima, stepping along beside him. “I see no stars in my sky.”

Daniel looked up through the trees that lined the path. Blank dark. Emptiness. As if the hand of God had taken everything away. He looked at his house, through the window of which he could see the flickering of firelight as if the house meant to encourage the sky. And whereas the stars were cold and lifeless, the black air around him was tangy with woodsmoke and
he could hear Bett calling her wild boy. He sniffed at the air and moved toward the place he had built with the help of that child’s father, although he knew in some part of his mind that Bry was more likely the offspring of Jester Fox. There was his dust-coloured skin to consider and the attitude of his mother, who had named him so strangely. Still, here was the log house he and Simus had built. Daniel walked on through the dark, knowing his wife would be waiting for him to lie down beside her. And something stirred in him at the thought of it, although he could not allow himself the pleasure of such lust.