The Purchase (42 page)

When the miller tapped at her door and she opened it, she saw that the light had been put out in the granary. She received the bowl of warm milk and a piece of bread from his hands and remembered to say, “I thank you.” She noticed a cold sore at the corner of his lip. “A concoction of sage, alum, and sugar will heal that sore,” she said.

Her benefactor answered that he was much obliged.

B
y afternoon they had not stopped, not even slowed, and the road was dry and dusty so that Bett choked on it. “Mister!” she called up, but the road went mildly on and the driver did not seem to hear. Were there patrols? Everything would be wild in Kentucky but a certain lawlessness might make travelling easier. One day, when there was a time for it, she must think over how all of this had come about, how Bry had run for one reason and she for another, and how the newborn child was in the in-between place of a lost soul.

The wagon bumped along and Bett tried for a little comfort but could not find it, mashed in as she was and remembering a game she had played as a child. A girl – what was her name – hiding in a closet. Always so easily found. Was Bry like that? Would he betray himself with noise or sudden movement? Would he build a fire when he shouldn’t? Bett thought of the night that little girl had disappeared and how for some time uncounted she had sat in her grandmother’s kitchen, making herself learn not to care. And when she was sent to Jester Fox, never a dint was made in that shield of uncaring until Mary took her in. Then it was all as it might once have been, having a friend until that, too, came to an end. Betrayal after betrayal. And now she would never see Mary again.

“Whatcha got there in them bags?” Sudden men, shouting.

The wagon slowed and Bett clung to the boards. There was a commotion of wheeling, circling horses, neighing, clattering hooves on the stones of the road. Through the small hole in the wagon’s side she could see the horses’ legs and then the legs of the men dismounting, boots to the ground. She heard them threaten her driver, and knew he would give in to cowardice and turn her over because of the shouting and yelling. He was on his knees. She could see his head bent down in its hat, until he was swallowed up by the horses and she was a stick trying not to break.

“Two runaways reported.” A deep voice was making words to explain.

“A witch doctor and her savage son.” This voice was quieter, almost apologetic. But they were rough with the old driver now, pushing him so that he fell against his wagon right close to her face.

“You wouldna be one a them abolishioners, wouldye?”

“Bleedin hearts?” Someone was climbing on the wagon, rocking it hard. “Let’s us take a look.”

“This un’s mine if he’s in a flour bag.”

“Pokem first. Makem bleed.”

The driver made no resistance as they began their search and Bett did not let herself breathe. Time by time she took her thoughts somewhere else to calm herself. She tried to think of her grandmother young and of herself as nothing and she heard her grandmother’s voice and smelled drying plants. She felt better for it, but her arms were bent hard under her as all of this went through her mind and one of them was prickling with the needles of sleep and she wondered if an arm could die before the rest of her. Then two or three men got on to the bed of the wagon and it nearly collapsed on her. They were cutting holes in
the flour bags, the contents spilling over her through the cracks in the wagon’s floor. There was a knife pushed down through those cracks and she screamed, but the sound was so dry that it couldn’t be heard and it was then, with the floorboards pressing against her back, that she saw the features of her mother’s forgotten face. And what do you think of your daughter now? she asked without sounding the words. Wherever did they take you that day you went away? You have a great-grandbaby now, born of my woes, but what difference do we make in this world unless we find our true shape?

At last, the men got down off the wagon and the horses made noisy commotion again with their mouths and hooves. Bett took the sleeping arm out of its bent-up place and loosened her grip on the underneath boards. It began to rain as they rode away and she tried not to shiver but remembered that it is a help against cold and that some of the flour would be washed away although she was coated and sticky and lay in discomfort, frightened, longing to get back on her feet. She wiggled her fingers to keep them awake and moved her legs that were wet with the urine she had passed when the men rode away. Her bowels complained and she bit her lip enough to make it bleed.

By evening they had come to a river that would have to be crossed, and when the wagon stopped, Bett climbed down barely able to walk and stumbled into a thicket to relieve herself.

“They are waiting to help just up the path,” the driver called out to her.

From behind the shield of a hackberry bush, she heard the wheels turn against underbrush and clatter over a wooden bridge. It was a strange form of goodness, she thought, this great charity that was anonymous.

Up the path – a gristmill. Resslers. Bett’s nerves were a surprise to her. Wasn’t she used to addressing closed doors behind
which some form of suffering always waited? Wasn’t she holding her medicine bag as usual, although her legs were shaking and she was covered with pastry flour? The rain had let up, but it was still part of the air and she went through the wet grass, picking her way around puddles standing like mirrors.

A
t a small, ramshackle farmhouse with a bird painted on its window, Mary spoke the three words she had been told by the miller were required of her: “I have freight.” She showed the baby.

“The barn is there open.” It might have been her Grandmother Dickinson’s voice with its Old World accents.

When she reached it, Mary was brought up short by the scent of dried timothy grass. It reminded her of the barn at the Clarke plantation where she had watched a slave sale in March. A mother had been sold to a man from out of town while her daughter went to someone up from Tennessee. “She never would learn,” Mister Clarke had complained, as if saddened by willful ignorance. Mary had edged up to the weeping mother. “Oh the poor child,” she had blurted out. “If only you had run away before this could happen.”

The woman had only glanced at Mary. “I oughta not take a little chile with me if I run, missus, could I?” That mother had thought of her child first. Perhaps Jemima had done so too, in her way. She remembered Bett saying she would go north the very minute Bry was old enough and Mary had argued the danger of that and convinced her father to take Bett in, although it had cost him more than he could afford. He had thought Bett would be free when the debt to the widow was paid. That’s
what she had told herself, as well, even when she did not say to her husband that the payments were now his to make. What is it about the smell of a barn, or a garden or an opened trunk that can remind us of past mistakes? she wondered, pacing the floor with Jemima’s squalling baby. The farmer’s wife had said she knew a woman who could suckle her, but Mary was afraid of calling attention to the stolen child. Instead there would be cow’s milk warmed at a stove. She spread a cloth and put the baby on a hay bale. Skin the perfect colour of an autumn leaf. The fingers fit tightly around Mary’s thumb. And the eyes were large and expressionless, dark brown shot with amber lights as if waiting to see what life would bring. Mary remembered Bry as a newborn, a little noisier, darker of skin and mood, being the child of tragedy, not love. “You are so like your father,” she had told him. But she had wondered about that.

Mary put her face on the baby. Nothing so sweet as this, she thought, and her own skin itched, so she rubbed the baby with her hands and a bit of Bett’s witch hazel, then wiped her with a cloth, thinking of Bett’s great knowledge – the way she had gone out in all seasons but especially in early spring, when the sap began its rise, to strip the bark off certain trees and boil it down. There were those who thought the tonics were trickery and hoax, like Doctor Howard with his threats or Ruth, who had tricks of her own. Mary remembered the dress her father had bought her because he thought Ruth could not sew.

When the farmer’s wife came in with the milk, the two women sat together enjoying the sound of the newborn’s noisy satisfaction. A baby’s hunger was as uncomplicated as fright but easier to cure, Mary thought, as Luveen’s lullaby came into her head:
There’s a new world a’coming, won’t you come along with me … 
. all of it there to be sung, and how good it would be to bring this little one to the wondering eyes of Luveen. Then
Mary wondered if the old woman might not be dismayed. It was not going to be an easy life for this little girl.
In what river are the falls between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario? How high is the precipice over which the water falls?

“So much to learn,” she whispered to the baby, who was feeding efficiently. She then asked the farmwoman about other travellers. Had she helped anyone get as far as the Ohio? Where was the best place to cross? What was the route? Had she seen a woman with shorn hair? Or a boy of about fifteen years of age?

The response was a vague description of the next stopping place. Apparently no one could be trusted, not even a white woman travelling with such a baby as this.

A
place that was mellow with light slanting past each dusty house and yard and barn and beyond it an old church lost in a grove of papaws. Then an overgrown lot. A young girl had brought Mary here, making a deal of conversation when all that awaited them was the lot with its weeds and trees and a dismal shed. The girl pulled a piece of canvas away from its front. “Go in,” she said, “where that newborned chile can repose.”