The Purchase (30 page)

Mister Boone had stopped to visit with her father on two or three other occasions and each of those visits had surprised her, for what did her father have of interest to say to such an explorationist? He had never been anyplace. He had not travelled even the last fourteen miles to the gap in order to look beyond at what Mister Boone described as a rumpled carpet of hills as far as the eye could see, telling stories that were already legends about those first forays along what was then called Hunter’s Trail. First the eastern Virginians had formed a company and obtained the Ohio land grant from King George and then the colonial government had refused to build forts and defend the new territory, which was claimed by both England and France as well as some Indian tribes. Jemima remembered hearing about this from Wiley, who loved to tell history at the table in his own house, although he was silent at Daniel’s table. “The governor sent President Washington out to confront the French, only he wasn’t president then and we weren’t even a country,” Wiley had told them one night. “And when Washington and the Virginians tried to capture a French fort …” He had paused dramatically and Isaac had shouted excitedly, “The French and Indian War!” Now Isaac was excited about Tecumseh, who was trying to start another war, pulling tribes together to fight the government.

While Jemima made secret visits to the millhouse, Mary and Bett kept close to each other in the new house. It was a time to console each other for Bry’s absence, his terrible suffering for which they had no cure. Wiley went off hunting on foot and left them together in a scratchy, tearful peace. When he was not there
for long days at a time, Bett moved up to the main part of the house, staying with Mary for comfort at night. But Mary had dreams she could not bear. A boy on a horse, a glowing gun, another boy hanging in a tree. She saw Jester Fox lying in the mud but she did not see herself. She was never a part of her dreams.

Bett suffered the torment of helplessness. She longed to go to Bry, to feed him and protect him. She muttered threats in her sleep. Once, she woke to tell Mary a story. “My grandmother told me that when she was a child someone was brought up for kidnapping a boy. In our old country, which is called Guinea,” she said, sitting up in the bed and hugging her knees. “And how did that child get returned, do you think?”

Mary said, “I promise we will find a way to –”

Bett shook her head. “That boy was returned when they offered another slave in exchange.”

“You can’t be thinking of going back there?” Mary put her arm around Bett.

She told her to be patient. She would speak to her husband when he returned. “Besides,” she said, “they would never take you in exchange for a young field worker.”

Circling Joseph’s small, sunken grave and its giving tree, Daniel often spoke to his dead son out loud. “Bry has been taken into servitude,” he said, avoiding the word
slavery
. He did not like to report such news, but it brought some relief to the heaviness in his breast. He told his child that he had made no contract for Bry with the widow and now what argument could he reasonably make? Mary was pacing and crying, Bett was in despair, and Jemima begged to visit the boy four or five times a day until Daniel forbade her to leave the property. Worst of all, Isaac had
found a Shenandoah musket through some secret negotiation with the blacksmith. He had equipped himself with powder and pouch and kept all of it in the shed as if Daniel would not find it there. Now the presence of a firearm on his property kept him awake at night as if it might ignite a war without Tecumseh’s help. He could not bring himself to confront his eldest son, who might then become even more subversive.

Ruth had her butter business. She had Prayer Meeting on Sunday. She had the garden to supervise and the family to feed. Ruth had occupation. She did not need to change the flat plane of her world. All this he said to Joseph, with never a mention of John, whose life was somehow connected to Joseph’s death.

B
y September, the first bolls were as white as clouds and covered the fields so that, on his horse, the driver might have been flying. Bry thought of Pegasus and made himself remember stories as he worked. Each slave was given a sack that hung over the front of his body, but Bry’s hung down past his feet so that he tripped on it and it swung in front of his working hands and hindered him. There was a basket at the start of his row and it must be filled at the end of the day with two hundred pounds of cotton, nothing less. The plants were taller than the boys and their branches shot out, breakable and not to be broken, hanging over the water furrows like clouds over glass. Beneath the bursting bolls the water trembled and the cotton was reflected and magnified. They were to pick down one side of a row and up the other, leaving only unopened bolls, nothing wasted, nothing dropped. The filled sack was to be emptied into the basket and if a branch should be broken during his toil, he would taste the whip. Miver and Wimpie used both hands to pull the cotton and drop it in the sack, but Bry had no skill and could only grab with one hand and pull back with the other, staggering under the weight of the swinging sack, dropping tufts and stooping down to get them. Hungry and burning with sweat, he stopped to take off his shirt and felt an icy bite from behind. It was a pain he had never imagined. Tears flooded his
eyes and spilled down his face. “Move on,” shouted the nameless one as sweat stung the open cut.

That night he was not allowed to go back with the others but was kept in the field to pick up the tailings. Darkness had fallen. He was starving, his back stung, he was cold and asleep on his feet but he had to scurry between the plants, bundling up what was left on the ground. Nameless was waiting at the other end of the field. As he dragged the basket of cotton toward the gin shack, the sky got blacker and it started to rain. He tried to hurry, but the basket was heavy. If the cotton got wet, he would be hit again by the stinging whip. Someone at the gin shack lit a lantern. He saw it blinking, let go of the basket, and ran for the trees at the edge of the field.

Two hours later, at Mary’s house, he went around to the back and pressed his weight against the door to the cellar. “Mama Bett, it is Bry out here,” he whimpered. “I got a whipped back,” and let himself sob. He had crossed fields at a run. He had climbed in and out of trees and struggled to find his footing. His face was streaked with tears and when Bett threw the door open, she pulled him inside. “Oh, son!” She sounded frightened. “What have you done?” She led him to a chair and took his chin in her hand to examine his face – so longed for, so missed. She kissed his wet eyelids and yanked at his shirt, already torn, bedraggled. Cleaning the wound with water and soap, she said, “You might have washed this.”

Bry hung his head. “I coundna reach.”

“Could not,” Bett corrected. “No slave talk here.”

“I am a slave,” Bry whispered.

“No one may own your mouth.” Bett crossed the small room, plunged her hands into a pot, and brought them out slick with
the oil of wild tobacco leaves. She kissed the child’s thin, bare shoulder, cursing the wound, although she had certainly seen worse, and gentled the poultice into his flesh, kneeling before him. “There now. You will heal.”

“Never. I will not!” Bry took a breath. “You never came for me!”

Bett got to her feet, gripping the chair as if she had suddenly aged. She went slowly to another pot, taking it down from a flimsy shelf she herself had built, and applied a second poultice on top of the first, this one of pine resin and hog’s grease.

“I’m not going back, Mama. You don know.” He began to cry again.

“One stroke! You are the one who doesn’t know. I lived there for years. Years! And I’ve shed enough tears for us both, so dry your eyes.” How could he be expected to understand when she had never told him. “Go on now, child. You don’t want to be found. Hurry on up before it gets light and get back to the quarters. I’ll find a way to bring you home. It is a promise I am free enough to make.” She rubbed his short hair with a softened hand.

“You’ll see me when they come for you to bury me!” he shouted, rushing back into the night and through the thick trees to find Floyd, who slept at the mill with his slave children and slave wife. The devil’s fingers snapped at him but he ran with the bandages damp on his back. Floyd was like him. They were the same. Bry felt sacrificed. Floyd had cut off the chains of that old slave man.

At the mill, Floyd opened the shutters and growled, “You bring em down on us, boy. Go on back where you belong. Ain’t you a nigger too?”

It was on the following Sunday that Bett walked to the Fox place for the first time since she had run away years before, going through the forest in order to stay out of sight. The old farm had burst its boundaries and covered itself with white bolls of cotton – rather, the hands of nine slaves had covered those acres with cotton, and among them was her child. She worked her way to one side of the quarters, peering into the nearest cornfield where a boy was running in a crooked line, waving his hands. She whistled. Would he hear? The whistle brought him to the fence and she asked after Bry. Would he fetch him, please?

For a long while, as the sun moved across the sky, she tried to enjoy her anticipation, but the waiting was cruel and went on for hours. She told herself that he had spent six days gathering bolls with swollen fingers and dragging gunnysacks full of the stuff to the selfsame wagon that had captured him. She persuaded herself that he was too tired to visit the mother who wanted to touch his face, his arms, his reedy neck because he knew that if he went to her, if she touched his skin, if she made him feel hungry and sad and sick for home, he would cry and beg again. She told herself it was only this that held him fast to the wretched cabin while the others plucked at their weeds and washed their bodies and clothes and cooked up a Sunday meal or tried to stand up and dance. Unless he had given up on her.

O
ne night in March a young woman appeared at Mary’s door somewhat out of breath. The face was pale under her netted hat as she explained her errand. “I am Elizabeth Ransome from Richmond,” she said. “I accompanied my father, who has business at the home of Rafe and Ebenezer Fox, where he has taken sick.” Her way of speaking was from someplace else – a Tidewater drawl. “I am told you have the means to help him as the nearest doctor is quite far away.”