Stand the Storm (3 page)

Knitting Annie died—wound down like a clock—on a stuffy afternoon in the loom room. The knitting she worked fell from her hands and her needles ceased sound. Sewing Annie felt all the air leave her body at the realization that Knitting Annie had gone. She sat and knitted a full five more rows before rising to call others to account for the old precious.

The old woman had in her prime been an expert gang leader for sewing and knitting, soap-making and yarn-dyeing. Her long suit was setting forth the steps to a task and pressing the workers to it. Over her lifetime she had forgotten more than the others had yet learned. Grief-stricken and shorthanded, Sewing Annie faltered and production fell off. Two girls, yet too small for fieldwork, became her assistants for toting and fetching. Neither of these children had aptitude for needlework. Thus the workload for Sewing Annie was punishing after the old woman’s death.

Added to this was numbness and confusion. The old woman had been her constant and she felt like a stool that had lost a leg. She was impatient with sitting at the weaving loom and walked back and forth making a circuit of the room that she’d shared with the old woman—a room that now seemed shrunken. She stood at the doorway and worked upon her knitting. As it grew, Annie wrapped the length around her shoulders. She wore it as if it were her own shawl. Onlookers were disturbed. They all believed it was bad luck for a needlewoman to wrap herself in her own knitting while working on it.

Annie stood in the doorway and listened to the cadence of the blacksmith’s blows. She recognized a love of regularity in the man who’d taken the place of the deceased blacksmith. Two deaths—another one to come! The new head blacksmith had a contemplative demeanor like hers. She heard it in the tone of his strokes. He gained momentum on the regular and rising movements just as she was used to doing. This was the technique that the old woman had taught her. He, too, could endure for the long term, for he credited rest and recovery deep in his work. He was productive as she was.

Old Knitting Annie had giggled when the young woman told her about dreaming of a snake pit.

“You’re wanting a man. ’Tis a plain dream of woman’s longing,” she’d said when the tale came out. With the old woman gone, the yearning became keener.

“Your wrap is pretty, good woman,” the blacksmith said, surprising her. She started, then came to herself and saw that she was standing in the doorway of the blacksmith’s barn. He did not halt his strikes, but only looked at her when he spoke.

When she came again to stand in the barn door and knit, he was alarmed for her and also drawn to her. To protect her, he made a show of interest. He knew she’d only come to listen to the doleful hammer strikes. But Mistress was liable to think her gone from grief and sell her off. Bell grinned at her, though mostly her head was hung down. It was an unusual courtship—this first feigned interest.

“You’re a pretty woman,” he said after some days of looking at her. “Prettier than that shawl you’re doin’ up,” he said, laughing. Indeed he brought out the bloom in her all at once with these words.

Permission was granted that the two could set up housekeeping in the cabin that Sewing Annie had shared with Knitting Annie. Until they joined Field Annie’s gang, the two little girls who worked with Sewing Annie had to stay with them.

It didn’t please Master Ridley for Bell and Annie to take up together. Some of his slaves he didn’t want becoming permanent with anyone particular. It made it messier when the time came for a sale.

When baby Gabriel was born, fears began to fidget in Sewing Annie. As hard as she felt for Bell and feared a separation, she was ten times more bound to the babe. When Ellen came three years later, there was an increase in nervousness offset by a lulling into further happiness. The run of luck seemed to hold for Sewing Annie.

There were evenings of Gabriel as a bandy-legged toddler sucking on a sugar tit in the middle of the cabin floor. There were evenings of Ellen dandled on Bell’s knee. There were hushed nights of Bell and Annie holding each other for dear life and true pleasure. There were stolen moments at first light or deep dark when Annie kneaded Bell’s shoulders. There were secret suppers of corn pone and hog entrails and stolen delectables.

Bell yearned to formalize his relations with Annie. He wanted a marrying ceremony. He wished to stand up in front of the folks and proclaim that Sewing Annie was his woman and none other. He wanted to put a claim on his children. Much of this feeling was on account of being the blacksmith on the place. Working with the hammer was a point of distinction and it did raise Bell above other hands. He appealed directly to Master Ridley, who respected the man’s abilities but was leery. Bell pointed out to Master that he and Annie had stayed together for a time and that they considered themselves to be good Christian folks. Bell would have gone on to mention the children, but he cut his appeal when he glimpsed the expression on Ridley’s face. Days after, it worried Bell that he might have said too much to Master Ridley—that his reach had exceeded his grasp.

Sewing Annie had seen the face, too. She’d stood at Bell’s left shoulder with her head inclined tight to the floor. She would not presume to enter the exchange between her man and her master. She turned herself to salt to remain there to listen and know. Her eyeballs swept from one side to the other without moving the lids, straining to interpret the faces of Bell and Master Ridley. She saw Ridley’s displeasure and felt fearful.

Bell, expert at talking with the hammer, anvil, and bellows, was smart enough to know to clamp down and be dumb around the top folks. He said no more about marrying.

When Bell had his accident—accidental injury is what a blacksmith expects to meet him someday—the hammer rhythm stopped abruptly. His attention wavered? Who is to say? Bell lanced a great gash on his own forearm and the normally quiet man howled fiercely and ran out into the dirt yard in front of the smithy. The women working in the kitchen—they were closest—responded first to his hideous cries. The cook, running outside at full steam with a lard jar, slathered Bell’s forearm.

Sewing Annie, nerves curdled when she heard the roar, ran out from the loom room, trampling her knitting in the dust. The two kitchen helpers, Annie, and the cook carried Bell to the cabin. Gabriel followed his mother. The toddling Ellen sat like a top in the dust staring at the women lifting, howling, and pulling and dragging to get Bell in the cabin.

Despite quick application of salve, Bell’s wound festered. When the doctor was summoned, he told Ridley that the only way to save the whole man was to take off the rapidly rotting section of the forearm. Ridley agonized over maiming a slave blacksmith. There was money lost in destroying the arm of a blacksmith! “ ’Tis the same as chopping off several hundreds of dollars!” he exclaimed to the physician. Reluctantly, he agreed to the amputation.

The accident felled the blacksmith like a tree, taking him down in a series of deep, agonizing cuts. Bell survived the operation but did not regain strength enough to raise himself from his bed for several weeks. Defined by his arms and mallet hands, he was half a hand after the doctor’s work.

The last and most painful cut was that Jonathan Ridley settled a debt for farm tools with selling Bell to Cyrus Wilson, a neighbor, who used him as a general hand to fetch and carry.

Two

B
REEZY RELIEF CAME
with the turn of season in the town. It was as if the breath that had been held all of the hot, stuffy summer was loosed. And the breath brought back all the wiry, lanky, rotund, and lop-legged politicians and profiteers to Washington and Georgetown. They came to the tailor shop in a flow, and the delicious uptick in business delighted Abraham Pearl and consumed every waking hour of his and Gabriel’s days.

“We two bees will have honey, Gabriel!” Pearl exclaimed. “Honey is the reward for the hardworking bee and we two will have it!”

The log of commissions for suits of clothing burgeoned and Gabriel’s output was the equal of Pearl’s. Staggering their duties and spelling each other, they smoothly accomplished a good deal. As they had no time to cook up anything other than coffee, the two relied on fried cornmeal cakes and boiled potatoes for their sustenance.

In the ever-brisker air of October, minds were bent on pork as well. As was the annual custom, all Ridley hands hired out were called back to the place for the task of slaughtering hogs and filling the smokehouse. Since always, even the smallest child was given a duty to perform at hog slaughter.

Though Abraham Pearl tried to keep Gabriel in Georgetown, the young man could not hold against Jonathan Ridley or the pull toward his mother and sister or even the smell of singed hair and smoking pork.

“Mister Ridley, sir,” Pearl implored when Ridley called at the shop to remove Gabriel. “I am committed for this boy’s work.” He dared not suggest how much indebted. “How will I complete these commissions?”

Jonathan Ridley allowed Pearl to wheedle a bit and implore him to let Gabriel remain at work. But he held his position and insisted that the autumn slaughter was inviolable.

“Mr. Pearl, I have told you this before. At hog slaughter, all of my able hands must join in. This one is no different. This year is no different,” Ridley pronounced smoothly, assured of no further argument.

Gabriel was commanded to stop his work immediately and sit in the wagon. His countenance revealed no preference in the discussion. He was adjusted to Pearl and content in his duties, but there was a draw to Ridley, too. He sat dumbly in the wagon while Pearl gathered a sack of his things. He included some intricacies of topstitching that Gabriel was to sew upon while gone. These items Pearl thrust into Gabriel’s lap and bade him quietly, “Come back.” Not a request, it was a simple, urgent invocation meant to influence the fate of solemn-faced Gabriel.

“We’ve a delicious journey, boys.” Ridley was gay and talkative when he drove out of Georgetown. He talked on brightly as if he intended to engage Gabriel and Mars, the driver, in his banter. Both Gabriel and Mars were clever enough to enjoy his levity in silence. Ridley spoke as if the hard days ahead of blood work and songs restored his vigor.

“We’ll have chitlins, boys! Our guts will be full of them and fine it will be, too!” he exclaimed. Gabriel was surprised because he’d thought Ridley at a remove from the delights of pork.

Master Ridley, Mars, and Gabriel arrived still riding upon enthusiasm. They were three of Ridley at home to be counted and reckoned.

The job Gabriel had always had—since the dawn of his remembrances—was that of fetching the largest laundry pots to set boiling. When he was very small, his mother had charge of this task and he had to help her.

“Set the caldrons, boy,” Annie cried in lieu of hallo when Gabriel’s shadow fell across her threshold.

Sewing Annie turned and looked into Gabriel’s maturing face.

“Hallo, Nanny!” he called excitedly.

“Set the pots,” she said, and brought him back to his boyhood with a thud.

“Pity the hog in it all, for the work is cruel but we love the ham!” was Jonathan Ridley’s sunup rallying cry setting each one to their duties.

At several days’ end, after the slaughter and sausage-making and preparation for smoking, sloppy hog entrails were awarded to the hands. These were gratefully accepted and in each household chitterlings were cooked and appreciated.

“Stir up a pot of them things!” Master Ridley shouted to Cookananny when he came upon her in the kitchen with his own pail of hog entrails. Laughing and hoorawing took up through the house, as hog chitterlings had some reputation for aphrodisiacal powers. The familiar humor ringing throughout caused both the mistresses to be embarrassed.

Hog-killing time conspired to make Gabriel forget his uneasiness at Ridley Plantation. He wanted Georgetown and he wanted himself and his mother and Ellen to be for their own selves in Georgetown. He knew it was audacious and dangerous to be dreaming in this way. But Gabriel no longer doubted that the plan would form up. “Nanny, would you not be free?” Gabriel asked, and glanced at his mother’s face in profile. He knew that she mightn’t answer with words, but would give him the picture on her face.

“Keep shut, boy,” she said warily. The thing she was always was wary. Sewing Annie was never a believer in the mystical efficacy of the hush pot and other widely held fanciful notions. The only way to keep the white people from knowing what was planned was not to talk in their hearing. Gabriel chuckled silently to think his mother did err on the side of caution. He’d not known Master or Mistress or any other to hear from so great a distance as between the main house and Sewing Annie’s cabin.

“Nanny? If I come away, will you come?”

“To Canady?” she queried.

“Yes, Nanny, to Canada—perhaps,” Gabriel replied.

“Is’t where they all go?” she asked, and went quiet to consider. “What’ll we do if we get there? Will we sew and mend for hire? Is there custom there?”

Gabriel was confounded at the clarity of his mother’s thoughts and understood that she must have been thinking toward this. He yearned the more to talk to her.

Evenings at slaughter time were also productively spent with hands set to quilting. Nearly all of the women and a fair number of the men worked at quilting the tops pieced by Sewing Annie and the mistresses. Given a corner of the frame to work upon, each quilter was part of a four-person team. As the teams competed for prizes of smoked ham hocks, Gabriel, Ellen, and Sewing Annie were not allowed to form their own group but were circulated to others.

Teamed with three old sheep-shearing hands who were past strength for fieldwork, Gabriel worked his needle, as his mother required him. “You are your mam’s boy,” one old sheep-shearer had to say. Folks always said this and meant it kindly. Those who recalled Bell, the blacksmith, would say it often.

Young Ellen and her graceful, competent hands were put together with three old preciouses and their slower fingers. Ellen was sullen and silent, for she craved to trade gossip with the younger girls.