The Purchase

by Linda Spalding

  Now Mary looked at her father, who remembered his Barclay’s after all these years. In the dim light, she could see grey strands in the hair at his temples and in the beard he had grown since Joseph’s death and she wondered how she had failed to notice these things when she had given such attention to another man’s face. She looked at Bett, who was sitting on the dirt floor in her faded dress staring at walls badly chinked, soiled with rain and mud and tears, and at Bry, who was still clutching the red cloth bag. She could not leave them behind. They must be always close.

  The night was very still, without breeze. Mary was trying to create a mood, to inspire a seven-year-old child, but why? Daniel stared at Bett, whose hands lay on her tired dress. He had seen her make clothes for herself and her child out of remnants. He had seen her put Bry in the cast-off shirts of Benjamin or Isaac. But Mary was cleanly dressed in good grey linsey. The wool in its weft had come as a gift from Wiley Jones, who raised sheep with his father. His mother had spun it and woven the fabric as a gift. Daniel wondered then if he had been invited out to the lean-to so that Mary could make an announcement. Perhaps this performance had nothing to do with Simus or Bry. Perhaps Mary wanted to fortify her position, to warn her parent, to ready him for a proposal by showing her maturity? Wiley Jones had been making weekly visits to the Dickinsons, bearing gifts. But Daniel did not like Wiley Jones, and wanting no confession of new faith from his daughter, he got to his feet and announced that he and Jemima should be off to their beds.

  Mary stepped forward to take him by the arm. “Tell Bry there are no spirits in the woods, Papa. He must learn so that he can live in the world. I am going to teach him our Catechism. I will also teach little John.”

  Daniel lifted the latch. “John will be Methodist.” He ducked under the lintel, and as he did so Bry ran streaming past.

  “Blessed are they that do His commandments that they may have right to the tree of life,” Mary called after him.

  “Your acolyte has escaped,” Daniel said dryly, letting the door slam.

  The space between house and lean-to was so dark that he put out a hand to feel his way. “I wish you success in your efforts,” he called back, remembering his mother, who had trained him in the Catechism with a willow stick.

  “Pappy,” said Jemima, stepping along beside him. “I see no stars in my sky.”

  Daniel looked up through the trees that lined the path. Blank dark. Emptiness. As if the hand of God had taken everything away. He looked at his house, through the window of which he could see the flickering of firelight as if the house meant to encourage the sky. And whereas the stars were cold and lifeless, the black air around him was tangy with woodsmoke and he could hear Bett calling her wild boy. He sniffed at the air and moved toward the place he had built with the help of that child’s father, although he knew in some part of his mind that Bry was more likely the offspring of Jester Fox. There was his dust-coloured skin to consider and the attitude of his mother, who had named him so strangely. Still, here was the log house he and Simus had built. Daniel walked on through the dark, knowing his wife would be waiting for him to lie down beside her. And something stirred in him at the thought of it, although he could not allow himself the pleasure of such lust.

  While Daniel watched the shadows of firelight behind the curtain of blankets that still made a wall around his bed, Mary and Bett lay in the lean-to with Bry asleep between them. Their bed had been large enough for a family, and the two grown girls and the small boy had space enough for comfort. “I am going to marry Wiley Jones,” Mary said quietly. “He is building a house for me. We will have to make Bry better civilized.”

  Bett said, “I can never live with Wiley Jones.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Wiley was often at the Fox house, Mary. Did you not know that?”

  “They were only boys.”

  “And now he is a man who will decide your life. But he will not decide mine.”

  “Decide my life?”

  “It is what husbands do.” Bett was surprised by the great difference in their understanding … it was a dichotomy, a word that suited her since she knew herself to be both stupid and wise. She was stupid because of her bondage – for who would credit a slave? – but was wise because she knew what men could be. Leaving Bry on the bed asleep, she got up to stand on the bare ground of the lean-to, swept clean that day. She had pounded it so the dirt wouldn’t rise with their footsteps. She had cooked for Mary and for herself and her son and she had made a remedy for Pastor Dougherty, a man she had never met.

  Mary was considering Bett’s words. “My father does not keep Ruth from her butter or church.”

  Bett said, “He uses her money as he pleases.”

  Mary considered this. Ruth had three cows. She had bought another hog and two sows. She sent piglets to market every spring and fall. Every morning and evening Floyd’s woman, Cherry, milked the cows and every week she and Ruth made butter from the cream. Never did Ruth have a penny for herself. But Ruth’s needs were few, after all. “I am twenty-two,” Mary said. “I cannot live in this shack forever. We will have a better life with Wiley.”

  “You do not know him as I do.” Bett felt the old dark of the slave hut where she had lived with its stink of man piss. “I will stay here with my son.”

  “But we have our patients.” Mary felt a rush of irritation. It was she who had saved Bett from the widow and her dangerous sons, she who had moved into the lean-to to keep Bett company … She thought of the timber lot and the fallen man lying in the mud and told herself she had always done everything for the good of Bett. And now, when she offered her a true home … She rearranged Bry’s sprawling limbs and turned her back on mother and son. Bett may have loved Simus more than I did, she thought. And losing him to death may have been even more terrible for her, but losing Taylor Corbett to the distance between time and place, to the space between mountains and valleys is also terrible; it might even be worse. All these years she had written her letters of hope and with the last one she had sent a pillow stuffed with rosemary.

  Dear Taylor Corbett. I hope to come back soon. I await the wellcome that matters more to me than any other.

  He had not replied. She could hardly remember his face. She got up and opened the door, looking up at the sky, while the night pressed down, leaking its dark into their lives.

  It took Wiley Jones a year to build a house on the edge of his father’s property and Mary waited patiently, although more and more she visited patients with Bett’s tonics. They were composed of ingredients Bett refused to name combined in amounts and ways she kept to herself. “Mister Lyle’s hands are swelled up,” Mary might say. Or “Missus Cornet’s stomach has been cramping” and Bett would send her back to her patients with something specific for each complaint and most of them were relieved of their various irritations and comforted by Mary’s attentions. She had that something about her, they said, that came from her Quaker background. Or they said that, like her stepmother, she was gifted, that the creek and the ground it ran through were blessed. For Mister Craig’s bowel complaint there was something unnamed simmered in milk. For Mister Sharpe’s asthma, there were ground anise seeds steeped in aqua vitae and something unnamed.

  Wiley worked alone building his house and making weekly visits to the Dickinsons bearing gifts. Knowing Daniel’s aversion to weapons, he never brought his gun onto the property but came with venison or quail, asking to see Isaac and hoping to see Mary. “Your house is ready,” he told her one day on the path between the lean-to and the house, noticing the way she had knotted her hair at her neck and the strong hands that were tucking it under her cap.

  “My house.” Mary had walked past it many times, but now it was real. She was going to marry Wiley Jones and be someone entirely new.

  “I am going away, to be back in ten days. Will you meet me at the pastor’s then, just after midday?”

  Mary had agreed to this. She had met Wiley’s eyes and said she would meet him anywhere
, and ten days later, in the shade of the sycamores, she told her father she wanted the wagon. “Wiley Jones has asked for me.”

  Daniel’s heart beat against his jacket.

  “He is a friend to me, Papa.”

  “Taylor Corbett is a Friend.” Daniel gave the word emphasis.

  Mary tugged at her apron and said she had heard nothing from Taylor Corbett. Not for a very long time.

  “Letters go astray. Perhaps he’s found no one to carry it. Have some patience for once, child. This alliance with our neighbour is too quick.” The son of Frederick Jones liked only to hunt and trap and fish and travel as far afield as possible in search of risk, and these were entertainments Daniel did not admire. In truth, he had more doubts about Wiley Jones than he could easily explain.

  “He has called here many times.”

  “But there should be.… With thy mother, it was …”

  “I know, Papa. And I shall do my best.”

  “And shall Wiley Jones do his?” Was it no longer usual for a young man to speak to a girl’s father? Had he moved his family into such an uncivilized place that all custom was abandoned?

  Mary said, “He has built me a house,” meaning to prove something to her father. Daniel turned, needing a minute to think, but she followed him into the house, insisting that she must have the wagon as Ruth slammed her mallet into a piece of venison Wiley had brought and told Isaac he must go get hot ashes from Missus Jones because he had let the fire go cold during the night.

  “I shall walk,” said Isaac, seeing Mary’s look of panic.

  But Ruth said there was also the wheat to be threshed and the wagon was needed for that and what did Mary want with it?

  Mary decided that, if her father did not grant her the use of the wagon, she would never marry Wiley Jones or anyone else. Without the wagon this very morning, she would live in the shabby lean-to forever. So it would be decided. She kept her eyes on her father and her hands clenched at her sides while she thought of Wiley’s straw-coloured hair and serious eyes. He had kept her family fed over the winter just passed. He had taken Isaac under his wing like an older brother. This morning she had gone to the creek to bathe in privacy and think of the words she would to say to him in the pastor’s house. She had soaked in the water and silence and prayed, and when the bathing was finished, she had collected her clothes and put them on again. But for the trip into town, she would wear the grey dress Wiley’s mother had made for her. It was even now hanging in the lean-to, waiting for her to become what she might become. She had waited a year. She would rebraid her hair and reknot the braid at the back of her neck and go off in the wagon. If only her father would grant it to her. Nothing else would she ask of him – not land or dowry. And once she was married, she would be someone else, a different person, unhaunted.

  Daniel had spent the first part of the morning trying to decide whether to sow his winter wheat in the corn stubble or in regular rows. With the first method, the stubble would have to be cut with a hoe during a freeze, but he would avoid the plowing. He looked at his daughter’s upturned face and told Benjamin to hitch Mulberry to the wagon and told Ruth she would have her fire and that the wheat would get flayed in good time. He said a smooth piece of ground near the stacks had been cleaned of weeds and the boys would spend the day removing the straw and taking the grain to the mill. At the moment, he could not remember why any of this mattered. He must hand his daughter into the wagon and give her the reins. “As to Bett, your husband may assume payments to the widow,” he said somewhat bitterly.

  Outside, he stroked Mulberry’s ears and tried to speak in his accustomed way but something caught in his throat. “Go on with thee,” he muttered as he watched Mary climb up and speak the horse into a trot, skirting the apple tree, which was once again bearing its fruit. In front of them, Ruth’s chickens scattered, taking short flights into the bushes while John ran ahead to move something out of the way. An auger. Who had dropped it? Daniel felt a flash of temper like a separate being as he watched his daughter slip away.

  That night, Bry left the lean-to because one mother had gone out into the woods with her collecting bag and the other was gone for good. He was eight years old and alone in the dark for the first time and he heard sounds and thought of wolves and wondered if he should go back to the safety of the lean-to. He wandered on, wondering why Mama Bett had refused to go to the house Mister Wiley had built. Mister Wiley had once made him a wagon and painted it blue and said that Isaac and Benjamin should not touch it. Mother Mary had told him that in the new house he would have a room of his own and the thought of that made him feel strange but he picked up a stick and slashed at a tree, hearing the whack of it with satisfaction.

  As he walked, being careful to make no sound and leave no mark, as he had been taught, he thought that Mary must surely be missing him and would be glad to have him suddenly appear if he could find his way to her. It meant a crossing of the creek, which was rushing along in front of him and which was dangerous, and the moon was small, without much light, and he heard the sound of metal rattling and crouched down, frightened, unable to see. Squinting, he made out the vague shape of a man on the other side of the water. He was dark, like Floyd, and squatting as he drank from a metal flask. There were chains tying his wrists to his ankles so that he stumbled when he tried to move and the two of them, man and boy, peered at each other across the noisy water and the boy stepped into it carefully so as not to unbalance anything. A cloud floated over them and the poor light of the moon was further diminished. “Why is that chain on you?” Bry asked as he climbed up the farther bank, noticing the rise and fall of the old man’s body as he took in and gave out breath. When he got close enough, he put his hands around one of the arms ringed by its iron cuff and eased the man gently down the embankment, and slowly, slowly they crossed the stones of the rushing creek and he kept hold of the arm as they passed through the pinewoods and over dry needles underfoot, Bry thinking of Bett, who was somewhere collecting and would know how to help a man like this, and of Mary, who was asleep in a house he had never seen. They went on, man and boy, without even the sounds that might connect two animals, and after a long, shuffling, trembling journey, they came to the mill, which was inhabited by Floyd and his wife and two sons on its second floor. At the tiny entrance, Bry called out, “Hey?” in his boyishness because he had spoken only once to Floyd and was afraid of angering him or, worse, of making him laugh. Floyd opened a shutter and came down and let them in and there was a file that cut through the chain on the old man’s wrists and tea made of yarrow and Bry remembered Floyd’s kindness the time he had brought him a broken wheel from the toy wagon Mister Wiley had made.

  After that, it was a matter of when to leave, and once outside again, the old man looked up at the stars, pointing and talking tunelessly about a country in the north and a river to be crossed that was called the Ohio.

  Upstairs in the new house, there was a bed where the married couple slept in a state of pleasant tension, Mary sometimes waking with a quick intake of breath to touch her new husband and run her hand down the length of him, still unbelieving. She was a married woman. At the wedding, there had been no one but Missus Dougherty to act as witness. Even so, Mary had felt emboldened and triumphant. Her husband was different. He smelled of leather, gunmetal, and oil, and she moved against his difference, putting her past away. The past was what lived on her father’s land and she would convince Bett to leave it behind by promising to set aside space for an infirmary.

  “As I predicted,” Bett said one day some months later when she finally arrived with her plants and gourds and bags and Wiley had sent her to live below the house in two cellar rooms with Bry. It was true then. Wiley determined everything – when meals would be taken and what would be eaten and who would sit at the table with him. Never Bett, never Bry, for they were cast as servants, with their own door at the back.

  “It isn’t what she is accustomed to,” Mary said to her husband. But it was a meek reproach.
She was glad he had relented and allowed Bett to live with them.

  “Bett knows her place,” he answered. “It is you who misleads her, not I.”

  “What she knows is every symptom of every illness,” Mary told him, explaining her need of a place to keep her patients close. In such a place, she could offer Bett’s medicines along with cleanliness and rest. She would earn a livelihood. She and Wiley were conversing that spring day in their upstairs room, with its pine bed and cupboard, which he called a chiffonier. They were keeping their voices low, so as not to be overheard. “I have so many patients,” she whispered. “I am too much on the road.” Some of the farmers were buying workers now, and there was a sickness in some of the slave quarters so severe that Mary had reported two deaths. Doctor Howard called it Nigger Consumption and treated it with his homemade pills. He had once or twice asked for Mary’s help.

  Wiley was buttoning his shirt. His father had given a piece of land to the Methodists for a campground and it was going to be dedicated in the next hour. “You should come with me today. It will be important to my father. And, Mary, if you must have Bett’s help, take her along when you see your people. I don’t want sickness in my house.”

  Mary knew she could never explain Bett’s presence at her side when she visited a sickbed. How could she admit her dependence? She said, “Bett would not like to be a public slave.”

  He picked up his boots and followed his wife down the narrow stairs in his stockings. “It isn’t a question of what Bett would like. It is a question of what you want from her.”

  “Friendship. That is all I want.”

  “A slave has no room for friendship.” Wiley pulled his boots on and stepped down hard on each foot. “Nor has a slave’s mistress. You have only to free her if you want her love, but you seem intent on having her thank you daily as her saviour.”