The Purchase (39 page)

Out there behind the house the ground was barren and dust rose around them so that for long minutes Bett covered her nose with one hand and held on with the other. When they stopped at the house and she heard Jemima screaming, she said calmly, “Free my son first. Or I will not save yours.”

Rafe clamped his elbows into her sides. “I’m afraid Mister Benjamin Dickinson won Bry last night in a card game and I am obliged to deliver him today.” He dismounted and pulled her down, then slapped the horse and let it drift to the stable as he pushed Bett ahead of him to the porch. They could see
Doctor Howard through the open door, pacing in the hallway.

“You wagered my son?” Bett’s voice was venomous.

It was now late in the morning and the bedroom curtains were drawn but she could hear Mary pleading and Jemima moaning and calling out. Mary came to the bedroom window, drew back a curtain, and looked out at Bett. She pulled up the window sash as Doctor Howard entered the bedroom, and Bett stepped over the low sill, went to the washstand, and cleaned her hands. Her eyes were half closed as she walked to the foot of the bed, pushed the doctor aside, and put her hand on Jemima’s body. “Oh child.” She looked up at Mary. “What has she taken? I hope there is time. Her pulse is very faint …” she glanced at a cup by the bed, picked it up and sniffed.

Doctor Howard was rustling in his bag, grumbling.

Bett used both hands, first putting her ear close to Jemima. For Mary, the room had begun to spin. “Too high,” Bett said. “Must be turned,” she muttered. “Can you help me, Mary? I need you over here.”

At this, there was a loud slam of the door and Mary turned to see Doctor Howard leave, his indignation like a cloud that settled over the room. Jemima had stopped struggling. She lay panting and moaning, only now and then turning her head. Bett was applying gentle pressure with her hands, feeling for the baby, trying to move it little by little from whatever position it was in. “Breech,” she told Mary. Then, to the unborn infant, “Your mama didn’t mean to harm you when she took the tansy, so you must turn now and come out to your life. We are right here waiting.” She managed a quick backward look at Mary. “We are losing her,” she whispered and began then to search with her hand until she found a tiny foot. “There’s no
time to turn this child. It’s the only way.” Mary began to sob, although the sound of it in her ears seemed small. The baby was folded inside Jemima, all buttock and leg. Jemima no longer struggled or panted. Bett tugged very gently, very carefully, until she beheld her granddaughter in her hands.

B
ry was waiting behind the bushes dressed in the yellow shoes Jemima had given him, shoes meant not for planting or picking but for standing on a porch, drinking something chilled. Shoes that had once belonged to Rafe. He had been waiting for hours. Now he climbed the steps of the back porch and looked through the open bedroom window with its curtains blowing. It was easy to enter and when he did he saw Jemima’s baby swaddled. He went closer. “Where’s your mama?” he asked the newborn. “You should be by her.” He picked up the infant as tenderly as he could manage and felt something for which he had no name.

There was confusion in the house. Someone was howling. He heard running feet and looked into the hall to see his mother coming toward him, swatting at the air. “Child, look what you did. Poor Jemima took the tansy. Give me that baby girl and run fast to save yourself!” Moaning, she took the baby from her son. “Go now, child! He’s seen the baby and he’ll kill you sure. Stay away from the Dickinsons’ place. It is Benjamin now who owns you. Take yourself north to that regiment Isaac speaks of.”

Then he was moving. Where was his knife? He felt for it in his pocket and thought of the baby, who had made little creaks like a fresh-caught mouse. Peering around the side of the house, he saw Mister Rafe holding Jemima tight, laying her down in
the wagon, shouting at anyone who was there to watch. Mother Mary was bent down on the wagon seat and Bry wanted them to take the baby too. But where were they going? Was Jemima hurt? Mister Rafe had a fine horse from Kentucky and it was something strange that he was taking the mule.

In order to study this fact, Bry climbed into a cottonwood, still in his slippery shoes. For no reason at all he thought of a time in the past when Jemima was spreading washing on a bush and he’d taken hold of a piece of it. “Now you have to do whatever I tell you to,” she’d said, “because that is my real mama’s handmade cloth and she might come out of the ground to bite you.” Bry had said his own pappy died on a tree and Jemima said to never mind about that, and all of it had happened when they were too young to know better.

What is the cause of an eclipse?
When Mother Mary taught Isaac and Benjamin, he used to listen from above, perched in a tree. Angel on high, she had called him until he could recite the lessons back and draw the letters in the dust, and she then began to teach him to read and write.

Mama Bett laying Mister Wiley’s table, placing the fork and knife. “Look at these fingers writing words and nobody knows you’re here.”

The wagon was moving so slowly it was easy to follow and stay out of sight. When he rode his horse, Rafe carried no whip because a horse has feelings – that’s what he said – a horse ruminates. But a mule is half-donkey, half-horse and can’t even reproduce. He’d said that to Jemima. Like a half-breed, he’d said. Now she was lying in a wagon behind a mule, Mister Rafe was shouting, and Mother Mary was small with her head in her lap.

Bry had not been off the Fox place for years but he had no interest in his surroundings. He was following Jemima. Tansy, his mother had said. What did that mean? Ahead, he heard the
wagon wheels make the sound of turning. They were going to Mister Wiley’s house, taking Jemima there.
I am staying with you
, he had promised. But she was vanishing and he could not follow her.

Somewhere in the dark there must still be a log house built by my father, is what he thought as he climbed another tree and watched the wagon rumble up the road. He would go to the cave and leave a message. Stay clear of Benjamin. All of them. It made no sense, but nothing did. And there was the house, still the same with its door that has never opened for him but once when the night was too cold for breath. Then the grass, where Jemima used to invent their games. He went through it making soft sounds with the yellow shoes. They had made blisters, but Jemima did not like to see him with bare feet.

The sycamores were taller, but the cave was the same, even holding the logs they had used for furniture and an old plate of acorns and sticks. He took one of them in his hand and wrote on the ground in their secret language. Come find me,
adding the word
Queenston
in perfectly formed letters.

Then he was passing places he had never been, moving north, sore-footed, cold now, his breath making shapes that he tried to read. He smelled the sap in the trees and sometimes his two hands gripped; his feet swung out and held. At the top of a sticky pine he took a jubilant breath, his stomach still strong enough to pull. So it took injury to heal. He scanned the world with its commotion of branches, checking the moss side of the trunks for north. The night was a wrap around him, but he climbed, practising his old way of ambulation, dogs maybe coming and men with guns and yelling voices, men who were happiest hunting a human being. When he felt hungry, he remembered how Mother
Mary sat with Mister Wiley at the table and how it was Mama Bett who washed the clothes and swept the floors and cleaned the dishes, which was altogether different than it had been before. Which mother do you love most? Jemima had one time asked.

They are the same to me.

No, Bry. Two things are never the same.

They are equal.

Different things are never equal. One and one are equal.

People are not numbers, silly. One is always stronger. One is always kinder or older or more beautiful or more afraid.

Bry loved Mama Bett because she was strong and warm and she allowed him to live in the trees. Perhaps she was more beautiful, though he had not thought of that. Leave him grow wild, it will serve his interests better than civility, she had said. But Mother Mary wanted to make him civilized. On full-moon nights she read books to him. She taught him adding and dividing. The Catechism. She taught him to read the stars.
What river between Virginia and Ohio?
The echo of her teaching voice.
Which direction and how far?
Tree by tree, foot by foot. He had not been more than two miles from the Dickinson place or the Fox farm in his life.
For what is Kentucky noted?
He had the very slight idea that there were caves in the vicinity because there were caves everywhere.

Kentucky is noted for caves
. The stars were speckling. Soon it would be light. He did not hear dogs. He was too tired to hear. Why was he hungry for meat after years of eating mush? He pulled a fistful of leaves off a stalk and stuffed them in his mouth. He should decipher the plant before eating it, but he was too hungry and he told himself there were animals who connive with the dark. Possum is what he’d get. Out of a hollow. The devil is temptation. When he killed it, he would build a fire.

R
uth’s voice. “Who?” There was no light on this porch where visitors were rare.

“It is Bett out here. I must speak to you.”

Ruth gave the door an inch of distance from its frame.

“Please, may I come in? I have brought you Jemima’s baby. She will need milk any minute now. Have you some at hand?”

Ruth opened the door and reached for a lump of infant so small as to be less than a jar of cream. In the light of the fire, she studied the tiny face. “Lord, have mercy.”

“It is Jemima’s. With Bry.”

“But where is Jemima?”

“I could not save her. This baby is hungry, Ruth. Do you have something to feed her with, something with a spout?”

Daniel was snoring behind the hanging wall of quilts.

Ruth said, “What should I do?” Then, “Jemima is …” taking it in.

“Rafe is bringing her to Mary’s house for laying out. Bry is gone north to the black regiment. Keep the baby away from Rafe. I can’t take her north with me. I may be caught.”

Ruth had gone down to the creek day after day, year after year, although blood had frightened her angel away. And in all that
time she had never spoken her longing as the angel had told her to do. With the children to raise, the butter to churn, the garden to hoe, the meals to cook, she had never been sure what it was she wanted. Now she gave Bett a warm wrap and all the cornbread left in the iron skillet. She gave her the boots from her own feet and a woollen jacket. She wished Bett well and sat down by the fire to think.
Speak out
, is what the angel had said, and in all these years she’d had no idea what to say. There was a hill out behind the house that she had never yet climbed. There it sat, round and inviting, shimmering in the sunlight while she did not even know its grasses. There was the cave where the children had played games of pretend. She had never once gone inside, afraid of the darkness and cold drafts and spiders. Ruth sat on the bench by the fire with a newborn infant on her lap and remembered that Missus Dougherty had been her friend until Jemima went away with Rafe. She had been with her when John was born. Ruth had said things to Missus Dougherty that day after taking a sip or two of laudanum before John’s birthing. She had said that Daniel had waited for two years before he bedded her. She had told her about the feeling of Daniel’s long fingers in her hair. They had been close. Now Missus Dougherty barely spoke to her and no longer needed her butter.