The Purchase (33 page)

To supply the millhouse, Benjamin pressed cider from Joseph’s apples. Ruth, eager to do for him anything she could, supplied butter and cornbread while Jemima offered to provide a daily stew. How else, she argued, would the millhouse become a stopping-off place for soldiers and emigrants? It was a plan that might have provided harmony and kept what was left of the family intact, but Daniel would not have Jemima in the company of travelling men. Strangers! He left it to Benjamin to ready the millhouse for commerce and Benjamin drove Floyd hard, insisting that he accomplish more than was possible seven full days a week. “We will appreciate the Sabbath when we are finished creating the world,” he quipped out of hearing of his father, who did not bother to check on his son or ask what Benjamin was requiring of Floyd but set aside a piece of Shoffert land for the growing of future apples. From apples, cider. From apples, vinegars, medicines, and applejack. From apples, pies and cakes and butter and sauce. Wood for machinery, cogs, wheels, and shuttles. Why had he never thought of it? Benjamin had found enthusiasm.

Floyd built shelves to hold sugar and flour and molasses and bacon, and Benjamin wanted a long narrow table with benches on either side. He wanted pewter cups but settled for wooden bowls into which he could pour soup or cider, and then Jemima took matters into her own hands. At fourteen, she had no idea of the outside world but now she walked each morning from her father’s house to her brother’s newly built place of business. Her heart-shaped face with its clear blue eyes served her well enough. In the little town of Jonesville, people’s heads turned to gaze at her. Curly blond hair and a small, upturned mouth – she was a rarity among the hardworking countrywomen. Only Ruth was unmoved. “Your beauty don’t earn no points with the Lord,” she would say.
“I know all about girls from my time in the place where I lived.”

Jemima was curious about this and found she had two impressions of herself. In public places, she felt admiration directed at her. But at home, she felt undeserving of favour, as if something was wrong with her, something she had been born with and could not erase. As she grew into an early womanhood, she sometimes caught Ruth staring at her and felt ashamed.

Daniel had built his mill and given it to Benjamin, and now there were customers who stood in line, waiting for wheat to be ground and building up thirst. Benjamin had found a press for the apples growing on Joseph’s tree, for Bry had been right and the fruit had reasserted itself. And little John, being more outgoing than his brothers, was sometimes permitted to travel with Benjamin for provisions. He was often lyrical, and if anyone approached the wagon, he would explain the benefits of fermented apples in his tremulous voice. “Remember the bite that caused Adam’s fall? Try just a swallow and see …” as Benjamin doled out a cup of cider in exchange for fabric or twine or tools or sugar or seeds.

Daniel had finally relented and allowed Jemima to help, although she must of course come home before the rise of the moon. Each afternoon, when she went to the millhouse, she wiped down the table and put a stack of wooden bowls at one end. There were only three spoons, so her stew must be runny. Three spoons and seven bowls and nothing to be done but bring in a deep pan of water from the creek and keep it stove-hot for the washing up. Most important was the cider, which was admired for its flavour and severity so that one winter day, when a customer opened the door and let himself in, he asked for a sample before he removed his hat.

“First close the door,” Jemima instructed. “Shall you want it warmed to do the most good to your bowels?”

The customer spoke softly, his words all and each polite. “If
thee
would warm it for me.”

Jemima’s face felt hot. It was a form of tease she did not like.

“Your stew. Is it saucy?”

“So I am told, Mister Fox.” Benjamin had gone to the barn a good while before to find a chisel, but he’d left his knife and she used it to cut off a chunk of corn bread to sop up the stew. Then she took up a bowl and walked to the stove.

“So you know me.”

“Umm. By reputation.” Jemima poured cider into the bowl and plunged a hot poker into it.

“As I know your cider. Will you take a swallow of my drink to lessen my fear of poisoning.”

“I never would do that.”

“Which? Kill or swallow?” He drew closer.

Jemima touched the knife that lay on the table. She angled herself and dropped it into her apron pocket.

Rafe said, “Just one swallow.”

Hearing Benjamin’s boots in the brittle snow outside, Jemima reached for the bowl and let herself swallow deeply as the door swung open and Benjamin came in stomping, dropping a satchel of tools. His breath hung in the air. “You find no welcome here, Rafe Fox.”

Jemima looked at Rafe’s face, which was sun-browned even in winter. She watched the Adam’s apple in his neck move up and down while his eyes darted from one thing to another, and she had no word for how she felt.

“I have found welcome enough,” Rafe said.

A month later, when he came upon Jemima walking on the icy road, he told her that his chariot was at her disposal.

“That horse looks too weary to carry another cruel burden,” she said, stamping her boots.

“A pretty lady is never cruel. Or will your brother perhaps object?”

Jemima looked behind her, then allowed herself to be pulled up to the seat of the cart. “It is not just my brother,” she said.

“My reputation precedes me, as you said.”

“Your past.”

“My past precedes me? That is unscientific.” Rafe’s cheeks crinkled into a smile. “And my history has been wildly misremembered, miss.”

Jemima bit her lip, trying to stay calm.

“I wager you’ve listened to some exaggeration of a tragic event, Miss Dickinson. And it would be swimming upstream against the current of your family’s unlikely beliefs to try to explain. But do you know what I have discovered? I’ve discovered that what happens in the past is best left there.”

Jemima’s hands were in her lap. She rubbed them together. “Not so. My mama died a long time ago, but I think of her all the time,” she said. “And a wager is a wicked thing, Mister Fox.”

“Just where might you be if your mama had survived?”

“Pennsylvania. Brandywine.”

“Being a good Quaker girl? Or would you be out riding in a chariot with your champion?”

Jemima frowned. “Good Quaker girls don’t have champions. And if we did … how could you ever be mine when you stole my dear nephew?”

“You should be careful about that claim. It does not flatter your sister.”

“My sister adopted Bry. When he was little … just born … she –”

“She did not bother to purchase him. Don’t you think she knew we would take him back? You will find that property is not a matter of sentiment.”

Jemima said, “Will I? When will I find that?” as Rafe put his hand on the back of her neck, and his mouth against hers, and she felt his moustache, his lips, his teeth. Her hat slipped to one side and she pulled away to straighten it, then put her lips back on his.

O
nly once did Mary enter the millhouse and that was on a day in early June to assist a wounded boy. Mary remembered him fondly. He said he’d been wounded by an arrow on his way to Upper Canada and he’d talked on and on, holding a flute and sometimes blowing on it unmusically. He was the second patient she had treated in her house – young Dooley Jenkins, lying on a pallet in the kitchen, talking about Tecumseh, who was fighting for the British. War had been declared. Poor young Dooley. They had not saved his leg, but she had watched the operation when Doctor Howard came to amputate.

Doctor Howard had been rushed that day, explaining that with the new gin coming to Lee County, there were frequent injuries, more and more cotton pickers to be doctored, more sickness in the crowded slave quarters. “Who would believe that the new short cotton would make us all rich!” he said with satisfaction, adding that he could use Mary’s help at birthings. Most farmers in Lee County still had no more than four or five slaves and if one of them was sick, it caused serious work delays. And so it happened that, on occcasion, Mary was called to assist Doctor Howard, taking up her black bag and travelling farther and farther afield. But Mary did not like to go alone.

“Do you know what he does for birthings?” she said to Bett. “He uses chloroform to make things easier for the women. He
prescribes bloodletting to relax the womb and ergot to speed contractions. All because he is paid by the patient and does not want a labour to take more than an hour. He has so much work that I am asked to take on the Clarke plantation in his stead. But I must have your help.” Mary was proud of her new status.

Then at last they began to travel together, bouncing in Wiley’s horsedrawn cart over rocky trails and across unplowed fields. In the slave quarters, they found a tubercular patient living with several other coughing workers on a damp and pestilential earthen floor. There were children with worms and diarrhea. Men with scabies. Pregnant women without enough food to nourish themselves. Bett’s presence lessened Mary’s fear, for she did not like the quarters and was hardly welcomed there. It also seemed to alleviate her patients’ suffering.

On their second visit to the Clarke plantation, with its fifteen workers, they found a labouring woman squatting in a corner and Bett went to her directly. When she knelt beside this woman, five others formed a circle around them while Mary sat on a distant chair, hearing them speak in a language she did not recognize. Bett’s tea was boiled up and taken and in good time the baby’s head emerged. After that it was Bett who was called, Bett who was asked for her tonics, and Bett who looked after the sick if they were slaves. “Bring the nigro,” a messenger would tell Mary, “as them workers like the aid of their own kind.” Mary collected payment of a dollar for each case and offered advice to anyone ailing in the big house where the Clarke family lived. In the cart, going home, she and Bett divided the coins.

For Bett, it was a large discovery, this new sense of belonging she felt. Field workers, house workers – all of them, her people. Because it was not a matter of skill or education that defined them, but only the colour of their skin. In the quarters, she was welcomed with touches and smiles while Mary sat on
the chair that had been brought for her and bandaged an infected arm or blistered back. “They are fed lies and false cures by Doctor Howard,” Bett told Mary during a long ride home. Her voice was bitter, as if it was Mary who had invented the plot against her people by being white. “Remember the boy with the wounded leg?”

“Doctor Howard had to amputate. I couldn’t make it right.”

“And I had to cure the infection he caused.” Rheumatism. Consumption. Scrofula. Doctor Howard’s Nigger Pills. Bett pocketed the two dollars Mary gave her and held her tongue. She was making a mash from the cotton root now that stopped conception and caused miscarriage. She had decided on this course when she’d found two women at one plantation labouring on the same day.

“There are too many babies,” Bett answered. “The women are bred like sows.”

A month later, when she was called to tend to a fourth miscarriage on the Clarke plantation, Mary began to wonder about Bett’s medicine. So many mothers were losing their babies. “Are you giving them something?” she finally asked, afraid of the answer she could read on Bett’s face. The two of them were homeward bound after a harrowing day. They were unduly tired and Mary was cross. “You must tell me that you could never do such a
terrible
thing. You must. I could not abide it.”

Sickened, Mary closed her eyes, letting the bay have his rein. “It is wrong. Wrong.” She would speak to Doctor Howard. He would intervene. “You are imagining this. What an idea.”

“I do not imagine this. Men are brought in for the purpose. Why don’t you inquire if the women have husbands?”

“Husbands? Those people do not marry. Why ask?”

Those people
. “I ask because I have a mouth and a brain. And after I buy my son’s freedom, I will buy the freedom of other children before they get sold away.”