The Purchase (34 page)

Mary’s voice was brittle. “And since each and every freed-up slave has to leave Virginia, you’ll be sending those children into homelessness. What will they do for shelter and food? And whatever would you do with more children? Wiley will not allow you so much as a dog.”

“Yet I feed his hunting dog, do I not?” Bett snapped. “And that dog sleeps at my feet.” She leaned her shoulders against the rough back of the seat and looked up at the shapely clouds while Mary used her handkerchief to dab at her face, then wrapped it around her hand so the reins wouldn’t toughen her skin.

W
hen the wagon came for Bett, it held two men and a warrant. Daniel had seen it pass his house and recognized the driver and the passenger. He came fast down the narrow path that had been worn between the two houses with Floyd’s two young sons in his wake along with little John. “Shoo,” he hissed at them. “Back with you, back.” The children disregarded him because there were two men standing at Mary’s steps speaking with loud voices. Mary was standing above them, and Daniel was reminded of the child who had stood at the bedside of her dying mother in the same attitude of fury. She had taken the same position then in her clean gingham frock with its starched white collar. It must have been the last time in her life that her clothes were starched, he thought now, wondering how it was possible that he had brought her to live among people so brutal. One of the two men was Rafe Fox and the other was the sheriff, over from Rosehill. Years ago, Daniel had snatched Mary away from meetings of silence that went on for hours, from the careful scrutiny of every motive and deed, from a community of justice, and now she was scowling down at whatever news Rafe Fox had brought while Rafe bowed to Daniel like a gentlemen. “I’m afraid there have been complaints about the girl you have use of from us,” he said wearily, as if he did not like to impart such gossip. “And I can’t undertake
the risk of that, sir. The poisoning of unborn infants, sir. No, I cannot! Especially now that Doctor Howard has sent this man to me with a warrant for her arrest. The only solution, other than letting him take her to jail, is that she stay under my supervision.” He scraped at something with the toe of his boot and took off his hat to spin it.

Daniel remembered the gesture. It was what Jester Fox had done long ago, before their lives were ruined. He said, “I will buy her here and now.”

Rafe pointed to his companion. “It is a case of breaking the law against slaves practising medicine and administering poison substances. She is not for sale.”

“Your mother and I had a binding agreement,” Daniel said through his teeth, feeling unaccountably old. “I look after Bett.”

“There is no paper to that effect, sir, and in any case your debt remains unpaid.” Rafe drew himself up to full height. “There’s legality involved here.” He put a foot on the bottom step of Mary’s porch. “I’m forced to take her back.”

Daniel cast a look at his daughter, wondering why the debt had never been settled, as Bett pulled the door open and stepped out, dressed in black. “I see that you have grown,” she said to Rafe, and no other word was spoken between them. She walked past Mary and got into the wagon without aid.

When they pulled away, Mary went to the bedroom and tried to calm herself enough to pray. Dear Father … but the thought of her earthly father came to her and she ran outside, where only John still stood by her steps. “Where is Papa? Why am I alone?” She wondered then, Do other fathers give up so easily? Do other husbands depart without a word? And thought, May you, oh may you, little brother, grow up to be a different kind of man.

A
t the Fox farm, there were twelve field workers now. Bry had been among them for more than two years and in that time the tumble-down quarters had been expanded but not much improved. In one of them, he slept on his log, ate his drippings and mush, and waited for someone to rescue him. Then word was passed around the quarters that the master had taken a kitchen slave. “She livin up the house,” said Wimpie to Bry. “Was yo motha, wan it? Used ta be hea. Maybe she back now.”

Sick with apprehension, Bry had no way to ascertain the truth of the matter until Sunday, when the slaves were given the day off to wash their rags and do whatever praying they could do. If she is there in the house, she will want to see me, he thought, although she had sent him back to this place without even a piece of cornbread or a drop of milk, and he had been angry and hurt by that. Now he felt only a quaking fear. For three nights, then, he could not sleep. He dragged himself through his toil and lay awake in a new kind of terror. “The men use ’em,” Wimpie had said. “The house gals.”

On Sunday, he sat with the others, trying to listen to Jimbo and longing for his mother with his full heart. Just to see her come through the wobbly door would make his brain cloud up and then a storm would surely hit him and he would be broken by it. Those were his thoughts while Jimbo connected a long
exhortation to a parable. He tried hard to attend, but he noticed a few specks of cornmeal in the dirt and put a finger down to bring them to his lips, still fidgeting. Then the door squeaked open and all of the listeners stood up fast and surrounded Bett, leaving a little room for Bry to squeeze in close to her clean-smelling flesh. He was taller than his mother now and she looked up at him with sorrowful eyes pulling his arms around her shoulders and nestling in. Who was there to inhibit them? For the first time in their lives they found themselves together in the midst of their own people, and all of them, every person in the flimsy shack, was moaning, in tears. “Oh Lord,” shouted Wimpie, “Bry Mama here!” And two or three people shouted amen to that.

When Bett looked around she recognized only one of the slaves in the cabin, a man named Julius, who was old now and missing his teeth. He had been there when she was a girl. He remembered her grandmother and the fine mutton roast she always cooked for the slaves on Christmas Day. “How you been, Julius?” Bett put her hand on his arm. “Oh my goodness, how you all been?” Bry looked at her in surprise.

“I’s good as ever, little gal,” Julius said, giving her chin a pinch. “We sorrow to have you back wid us. We glad to see you and sorrow.”

“You been takin care my boy?”

“Such as we kin do it we did.”

Bry kept an arm around his mother, but his mood had changed. He had realized, in the last few minutes, that his mother was no different than the others. Cleaner, but not much luckier, she even spoke like a slave in these surroundings. Bry examined the flesh on his inner arm, feeling peculiar, as if his insides were made of nothing. Who was he?

In the Fox kitchen, the pots still hung where Bett’s grandmother had once put them over the iron stove. There was the bin for potatoes and the hanging basket for onions. The kettle still made its sound and the stove must still be blacked and the fire set every evening to hold through the night. When Bett came into the kitchen, even the smells brought back her grandmother’s presence, but there was no solace in the memories.

O
ne day, Mary came to the fence. She sent a message and Bett came to the corner of the property to meet her in the black dress. The two women stared at each other.

“What have they done to you?”

“I shaved off my hair.”

Mary saw nicks, cuts. She was at a loss.

“To make myself unappealing.”

Mary asked about Bry then, and Bett stiffened and said, dreamlike, “They work him like a man,” and wiped at her head with the back of her hand.

Bett said they made her visit the quarters on any occasion of illness. Apparently her doctoring was fine as long as it freed the Fox brothers from the expense of Doctor Howard, who had brought the accusation against her. She was doctor and housekeeper both. She looked tired. “I aid the sick because all the purging and calomel and salt has made them weak. They talk of Black Vomit and name it a disease.” There was Rafe’s pawing and provoking that made everything worse, but she did not mention that. Once, he had managed to push her down. “Any of my girls,” he’d told her, “should make me ten or eleven babies before she’s done.”

“I did this to you,” Mary said suddenly. “I told Doctor Howard to put a stop to what you were doing to those unborn babies.”

Bett’s face was closed.

Mary stood at the fencepost in the road. They were separate, she and Bett, never to be joined again. Each of them would return to a life she could not share with the other. Mary climbed onto her horse. “It was Wiley holding the gun when they took Simus,” she said over her shoulder, because she owed Bett this last truth.

Then she rode back to the house where she must now continue her life without husband or child or friend, thinking not of Bett, for that was too painful, but of Wiley, who had left and not come back.
Dearst, I have to go to find yor brother Isaac I will return. Ther is meat dryng on the rack. Yor Wiley
. He had left with his usual satchel and enough food to keep him alive for perhaps a week.

Mary often thought of this satchel in the despair of night. In her mind she filled it with two pairs of stockings, a flask of water, a pound of dried corn, and another of smoked meat. She knew her practical husband had taken an extra shirt and a mending kit. Wiley was sufficient to any wilderness, but would he find Isaac? Husband, where are you now as I make my way home? Will you ever come back or did I betray my thoughts that day of the campground dedication when I saw you holding your gun? But if I had confessed what happened that day Simus was taken, he would still be alive. Oh Wiley, Jester Fox was grabbing at Bett, red in the face, hands on her neck, calling her harlot, and Simus made a leap at him, but I got there first, trying to stop him. I didn’t want Simus hurt. And maybe then it was an accident. Maybe I only fell with the rock in my hand. Bett doesn’t say, except that I looked as blue as a cornflower in that dress when I came down to the timber lot.