The Purchase (28 page)

After that, it was a matter of when to leave, and once outside again, the old man looked up at the stars, pointing and talking tunelessly about a country in the north and a river to be crossed that was called the Ohio.

U
pstairs in the new house, there was a bed where the married couple slept in a state of pleasant tension, Mary sometimes waking with a quick intake of breath to touch her new husband and run her hand down the length of him, still unbelieving. She was a married woman. At the wedding, there had been no one but Missus Dougherty to act as witness. Even so, Mary had felt emboldened and triumphant. Her husband was different. He smelled of leather, gunmetal, and oil, and she moved against his difference, putting her past away. The past was what lived on her father’s land and she would convince Bett to leave it behind by promising to set aside space for an infirmary.

“As I predicted,” Bett said one day some months later when she finally arrived with her plants and gourds and bags and Wiley had sent her to live below the house in two cellar rooms with Bry. It was true then. Wiley determined everything – when meals would be taken and what would be eaten and who would sit at the table with him. Never Bett, never Bry, for they were cast as servants, with their own door at the back.

“It isn’t what she is accustomed to,” Mary said to her husband. But it was a meek reproach. She was glad he had relented and allowed Bett to live with them.

“Bett knows her place,” he answered. “It is you who misleads her, not I.”

“What she
knows
is every symptom of every illness,” Mary told him, explaining her need of a place to keep her patients close. In such a place, she could offer Bett’s medicines along with cleanliness and rest. She would earn a livelihood. She and Wiley were conversing that spring day in their upstairs room, with its pine bed and cupboard, which he called a chiffonier. They were keeping their voices low, so as not to be overheard. “I have so many patients,” she whispered. “I am too much on the road.” Some of the farmers were buying workers now, and there was a sickness in some of the slave quarters so severe that Mary had reported two deaths. Doctor Howard called it Nigger Consumption and treated it with his homemade pills. He had once or twice asked for Mary’s help.

Wiley was buttoning his shirt. His father had given a piece of land to the Methodists for a campground and it was going to be dedicated in the next hour. “You should come with me today. It will be important to my father. And, Mary, if you must have Bett’s help, take her along when you see your people. I don’t want sickness in my house.”

Mary knew she could never explain Bett’s presence at her side when she visited a sickbed. How could she admit her dependence? She said, “Bett would not like to be a public slave.”

He picked up his boots and followed his wife down the narrow stairs in his stockings. “It isn’t a question of what Bett would like. It is a question of what you want from her.”

“Friendship. That is all I want.”

“A slave has no room for friendship.” Wiley pulled his boots on and stepped down hard on each foot. “Nor has a slave’s mistress. You have only to free her if you want her love, but you seem intent on having her thank you daily as her saviour.”

“It is her pride I am saving.”

“Or is it yours? Mary, Bett knows herself a slave. The trouble is she is bewildered as to who her mistress is. How much does your father still owe the widow?” Wiley’s eyes brightened. “Let me pay it and it will be clear to Bett where she belongs.”

“No!” Mary gripped his sleeve. “Bett would then ask for her freedom. And once free she would have to leave Virginia. It is the law now.” She paused. “She has no way to fend for herself.”

Moving to the door, Wiley lifted his gun from its rack above the lintel and ran his hand along the barrel. It was called “sweet,” this gun, because of the position of the lock and pan against the barrel, the strength of the springs, the speed of the hammer fall and the aim. He had oiled it only the night before and now he cocked it, lifting a knee. Mary had once seemed sensible. Her cool exterior, her quiet, watching face. Her uncanny ability when hunting – an unwomanly skill he admired. He had been attracted to that. He had courted her through every sign of her indifference, surprised when the wagon he made for Bry meant more to her than meat or quail. But Mary was tied to Bett by some knot no one could see. He had said so time and again. Now he said, “Bett will survive. She always has,” and turned from his wife. “The boy is old enough to be put to work,” he added, lifting his leather jacket off a peg by the door. “He cannot live here for free.”

Mary clutched at him again. “Wiley, dear, let him be. He gathers heaps of plants for us. He is learning so much now – history, geography, even my Catechism. He’s an intelligent, clever boy and has …”

“… no friends. He lives in the trees like a monkey.”

“Jemima is his friend!” Mary looked at her husband’s weather-hard face. He who paid attention to wind and rain and frost because these things altered the location of game and who knew the cardinal points of the compass by the thick bark and moss
on the north side of a tree. When he found a deer, he stood still, out in the open, until it grew accustomed to his presence. But with Bry he lurched and loomed and ordered. “You frighten him so. Can you not remember yourself at that age? And think of Jemima. She was lonely when our mother died. And then we left Luveen and she was even lonelier. But when Bry was a baby she adopted him.”

“
You
adopted him.” Wiley thought of the child his wife had not conceived. “Jemima treats Bry like the servant he was born to be.”

Mary began to pace. Perhaps it was somewhat true that Jemima was whimsical and spoiled. She often came to see Bry. They spent hours together. She had seen Jemima point at things she wanted and tell him to bring them to her – sewing scissors, a softer pillow – and he would rush to obey. A dead bird must be buried. A needle must be threaded. She made him read to her, saying her eyes hurt when she looked at letters. She’d put her hand to her temple and squint and hand him her father’s favourite book. She’d been forbidden to take it outdoors, but she often put it in the pocket of her apron before she took Bry out to the woods. Mary said, “Bry enjoys the attention and it does no harm.”

“Jemima is too old to be amusing a slave boy. She is what now, eleven, twelve?” He opened the door and lifted the gun and took aim, as if what he saw in the undergrowth was Bett’s son wearing his usual necklace of feathers. The sunlight caught the filigree that was imbedded in the wooden stock and the brass glimmered. Mary saw this and suddenly shuddered, clapping a hand over her mouth. “Oh,” she said. “Oh Wiley, no.” But that was all she said, for anything more would have shattered their lives.

W
iley had not noticed Mary’s shocked surprise when she recognized the gun. The thought of pretty Jemima, with her curls, out in the woods with Bett’s boy nagged at him as he mounted his bay. Pushing his boot heels into dark flanks, he rode through the thickets that surrounded a house that seemed no longer to be his, filled as it was by Bett and the boy. And now there was something else to consider – the new campground only a few miles down the road from Daniel’s house. His hunting dog always seemed to know what was ahead; he could smell it coming, even taking a scent from the grass, but humans were at a disadvantage when it came to foretelling circumstance. Humans loved to gather in crowds to pray and be healed, to sing and to celebrate the Lord, but what if his father was right and the campground was going to bring more business to Jonesville, more travellers, more settlers? Sooner or later there would be too many people and they would overkill or scare the game and hunting would be finished in these parts and he would need to find another livelihood. Right now skin and fur paid for powder and lead and sugar and salt. Skin and fur were currency in Jonesville. But all that could change and then where would he be?

The donated ground was uncovered of grass and full of mud raised by horses and wagon wheels. A few people sat on benches, but most were standing and mingling, waiting for the pastor
to bring a stirring to their blood. Soon enough, it began. “Bless these pines and oaks above us,” Pastor Dougherty called out over the human voices and the soft whinnying of horses and lowing of an ox standing beside a cart. Wiley could see him at the front of the little crowd, waving his arms and already covered in God-given sweat. “Bless every limb, for each will provide us with timber for the tabernacle we are going to build here!” Wiley saw his father standing close enough to feel the heat of the pastor’s skin and smell its stench. He dismounted and tied his horse to a post as the pastor began his sermon with Nehemiah 2:20: “
The God of heaven, he will prosper us; therefore we his servants will arise and build
.”

Wiley saw Daniel under his old Quaker hat with Ruth and little John. All men are equal, Daniel might have said, to explain why he did not remove the hat, and his neighbours were too polite to point out that it was God being honoured by the doffing of hats in this instance. Daniel liked to tell the story of King James, who, when receiving Quaker founder George Fox, had taken off his crown, saying, “One of us should surely be unhatted.” Well, Daniel’s coat had been patched beyond remedy, but his name was carved into the wooden plaque at the entrance to the campground along with the names of other men honoured by the community. “They are Quakers,” Wiley’s father had explained years before. “And most queer in their ways and the daughter you admire being the queerest of them for her tonics and laying on of hands.” For richer for poorer, the pastor had intoned on their wedding day, and now Wiley wondered which it would be. He caught the eye of Rafe Fox and looked quickly away. They had once been friends but that had ended with an argument at the base of a locust tree. He had shouted. He had stayed on his horse and then turned it abruptly and ridden away. Now Rafe put his hand out. “New house … new wife. Or so I
hear. Congratulations would seem to be in order.” There was a hint of doubt in the spoken words.

Wiley took the hand briefly and let it drop. “That’s about right. I built me a house and it’s already full.” His smile held no warmth. “But I’ve got a strong growing boy ready for work at the mill when I take it on.” Pleased with this inspired boast, he watched Rafe’s reaction.

Rafe was studying Wiley’s boots, which were easier to look at than his eyes. The boots were better made than any around Jonesville and the fact that Wiley had made them himself, as he made his breeches and hats, his jackets and gloves, was something Rafe quietly envied. This was a man with no need of a slave.

They had been friends in the past, but now the two of them sniffed at each other like dogs.

W
hen Old Missus Fox died in her bed one night the following spring, word travelled fast in Jonesville. What next? But the neighbours had not long to wait, for when Rafe rubbed his hands in the loam of his fields and tasted it on his fingers, it had the flavour of iron and sweat. When he looked at the sky, it had been there forever, glaring. Everything hinges on me and the dirt under my feet, he thought to himself. And he thought he would combine iron and sweat to bring forth the Lord’s unwoven raiment. Cotton. It was said to be a wonder in this southwestern part of Virginia that such a thing could ever grow, but he had ordered two workers from the east and nearly convinced his neighbours about the benefits of the new upland seed. What of the British blockade? they had asked. And he had answered, “They will never blockade what they need.”