The Abolitionist's Daughter, Page 3

  “Evening, Dr. Charles.”

  “Good evening, Benjamin. A very good evening, actually.”

  Benjamin’s throaty chuckle elicited an accompanying laugh from Charles, who mounted the steps two at a time and strode across the porch. The door opened before he could knock. Ginny did not widen the door nor back up to admit him.

  “You guarding the tower, Ginny?”

  She slapped her leg and stood back. Her narrow face broadened with infectious laughter. Charles joined in, unsure why.

  “Lordy, Dr. Charles, you looking like a bride ’bout to jump the broom, all those flowers on your arm!” She slapped her leg again.

  “Ah, well, Ginny.” He mocked a small curtsy. “If I have my way tonight, perhaps we shall have a bride at this threshold, but going out rather than coming in.”

  Ginny clapped her long fingers over her mouth. What might have been laughter strangled into a cough when she saw Emily on the landing.

  “What sort of foolishness are you two about?” Emily said, descending into the hall. She gazed at Charles with open curiosity and not a little wariness. He was dressed as he had been at the dance, with the addition of a startling green shawl-collared waistcoat. Ginny scrambled to retrieve the flowers as Charles reached to take Emily’s extended hand.

  “How lovely,” Emily said, bending over the loose blossoms.

  “From my mother’s garden,” he said.

  “Perhaps they should go into my own mother’s vase. Ginny, will you bring some water, please.”

  “Yes’m. They’re right fine, Dr. Charles. Smell good!” She emphasized the word. “Quince and daffodil and forsythia. Yes, sir, even got some early foxglove. I’ll just put them on the back porch, Miss Emily.”

  “I will fetch the vase,” Emily said. “My father is in the parlor, Charles, no doubt smoking his pipe. You’ll find him there. I’ll join you in a moment.”

  Charles was pleased. Now, he would have the time he needed with Emily’s father to express his hopes for marriage to her. He found Judge Matthews, as predicted, in front of the fireplace with his pipe. Charles strode across the room and offered his hand.

  Though Judge Matthews took the extended hand, he was not pleased to see Charles Slate come courting. True, he wished to see Emily blossom, see her dancing, laughing, talking. See her married. But he had not counted on Charles Slate with his disreputable father and his own questionable reputation, in spite of his medical competence. Nor could the judge imagine his sons would be pleased: neither Will, who managed the plantation and shared his father’s steadfast sense of justice; nor Jeremiah, whom nothing pleased, and who lived life much the way he had entered it, angry and restless, with a burden of unnamed guilt.

  The judge had concentrated his attentions on Emily in a hovering protection, attempting to heal his own grief by healing hers. He had prayed for a suitable husband, had sensed the growing interest of one or two young men of good families, only to see them reined in by fathers who vehemently opposed the judge’s antislavery stance. He had even imagined Michael Lambert for her, though the man was so much older. Instead, here was Charles Slate, wanting to court his daughter—the son of a belligerent drunk, who barely made crop on the small acreage he had inherited from a maiden aunt. Most likely, it was Adeline responsible for how the family managed. She was as much respected as her husband was scorned. Whatever had brought Adeline to Thomas, no one knew. By the time they moved to the small farm outside Greensboro, he had long since taken to drink, and she had somehow committed to making a life for herself and her children, with or without his assistance.

  Adeline had done well. She had schooled the boys, sent Belinda to the Yalobusha Female Institute, where Emily met her, and had versed all three in rudimentary social graces. Charles had made a doctor, though he was as wild as the horses he rode, if the abundant rumors and the judge’s own suspicions about him were true, even in part. The younger son, Hammond, though slow and not likely to ever earn a dollar, much less a living, was good and kind in the way of simple folk. And a productive farmer to boot, thanks to Adeline’s mentoring. Then there was Belinda, full of an unruly kind of sweetness, if not strength. Will had set his heart on that girl. The judge was glad to think that union now improbable.

  Yet here was Charles Slate, asking without preamble, but with courtesy, to come courting Emily. Educated and smart. Possibly a better man than the judge gave credit for. Though not landed, his profession as a doctor could secure Emily a livelihood. Charles exhibited a practiced charm the judge did not altogether trust, but which might do Emily good, bring out the cheer that had lain so long in her mother’s grave. And who else was there? As Judge Matthews thought about his motherless girl, it struck him how Charles was himself essentially a fatherless son. With quiet foreboding, he gave his permission.

  * * *

  As the courtship progressed, Charles and Emily sometimes strolled in the early evening down to the narrow creek near the house. She loved the soft air, cooling in the golden light, and Charles’s off-tune humming. As they walked, Emily studied him, trying to see in his face what could make him want her. More and more, as the weeks passed, she realized how little she knew him, how intimate a stranger he was to her.

  “When did your family come from Ohio?” she asked.

  “Oh, I was just a little boy, about three, I reckon. All pretty hard on Mama, I think. Belinda was born soon after we settled here. She was premature and they’d had another little girl who had just died. I don’t know what from. My pa inherited some land from a maiden aunt and thought there was more to be had. He didn’t have but a few acres in Ohio, just Mama’s garden, I think. Spent his time doing handiwork around the town.”

  “Is he still handy?”

  “Not with land. Never was that I can make out. Handy with a bottle.” Charles’s laugh had a bitter edge. “He was drinking then, Mama says, but not so much. I reckon they both thought some acreage of his own might keep him dry. Thought he might could make a farmer after all.”

  Emily tried to gauge his expression.

  “Well, none of that was true. The plot he inherited wasn’t much. And a good deal of the better land around was already taken up in land patents by folks like your father. Folks with slaves to work larger acreage. Well, Pa got him some land, not so much as he wanted, but more than he could work. And not enough to keep him dry.” Charles gazed up at the sky. “I doubt that much exists.”

  He turned abruptly toward the house, leaving Emily staring at his back.

  She caught up with him. Charles scuffed at a patch of moss with the toe of his riding boot.

  “Now, don’t misunderstand me, Emily. Sometimes he was dry, early on.”

  He took her arm. “But I ought to tell you something good,” he said. “See, he could whittle, loved to whittle. Kept his pocketknife real sharp. Little old thing you’d think wouldn’t cut butter. But in his hands, it was magic. He made us toys—made us whistles, Hammond and me. Out of little limbs. He’d auger out the sapwood from the center, good and hollow. Then, he’d bore a little hole and hand it to one of us to blow on. Course nothing would come out. He’d slap his knee and laugh. He had a big old, hearty laugh in spite of being a smallish man. Now laughing just puts him in a coughing fit. Well, but then he’d take the twig back and make three or four more holes, blow into it with his fingers flying and out would come a little tune. I never got the hang of it myself, but Hammond did. That’s how he started making music. Me, I never could.”

  “I’ve noticed.” Emily laughed.

  Charles tapped at her layered hoops.

  “You wear entirely too many petticoats, Miss Matthews.”

  “Indeed?” She smiled, her face tilted down in embarrassment at his forward familiarity, but with an angled glance at his laughing face.

  CHAPTER 5

  Nathan’s eye healed. The bone did not. The lesion continued to fester. Nathan bent himself to whatever work he could with his good arm, the left one with which he was adept. He found various ways to
adjust, balancing boards between sawhorses, holding them steady with his knee while he sawed. His modified methods allowed him to sand the boards smooth, until they felt like Jessie’s firm skin under his good hand.

  Nathan was aware how bizarre he seemed, sawing and sanding and building while his other arm withered in its sling, stinking. His hand had given him agony, though in the last few days it had deadened, like a useless gar caught and left unhooked onshore to die. He shied away from Jessie and the little ones, accepting the children’s hugs around his knees without bending down in return, touching Jessie’s cheek or her shoulder with his body turned half away. He sat on the porch late into the night, hoping Jessie would sleep through his lying down beside her.

  And while he sat, Nathan thought. He couldn’t divine what had prompted the attack. He was set for the block the next day. Agonized at being separated permanently from his family, but set nonetheless. Why would Conklin jeopardize the value of a slave at auction? Beatings were commonplace enough. To be a slave was to live in a netherworld of fear. Lashings waited in the shadows for anything from a failed runaway attempt to dropping a clean teaspoon on the parlor floor. Nathan cringed at the story of a slave infant, not yet walking, whose crying disturbed the mistress. She beat the child until it stopped; then it was dead. Nathan knew the truth of these tales. He knew of almost no black skin that was not laced with scars of one sort or another. Even the most fortunate showed the mark of at least one branding. Accounts of mistreatment abounded, traveling the countryside from slave to slave. Though filtered and embellished through a hundred lips and ears, whispered from one porch to another, one plantation to another, the names and details shifting, all these stories were nonetheless true. But this one made no sense.

  Nathan had recognized the men who came that night, all three of them. He knew their voices and their boots before he felt their blows. The fancy silver belt buckle was as familiar to him as Conklin himself. Nathan knew the mustard plaid vest of Conklin’s neighbor. And the distinctive boot design of Conklin’s youngest brother. He had polished the dust from them himself when the men rode in from a hunt. The images were as familiar to him as darkness to a blind man. The liquored, sweaty smell of the men had singed his nostrils. They had as well held a lantern to their faces as pull those slitted pillowcases over their heads.

  What Nathan remembered now came in fragments: the sound of the belt unsheathed from its loops, the heavy silver buckle catching the glimmer of the kerosene lamp in midair, the blur of clothing and limbs, his knee jerking up as the rifle butt hit his arm, the sound of the bone shattering, the rifle butt slamming into his head.

  Then, nothing. Nothing until he opened his eyes, Jessie’s face brought clear in a blur of pain, the awful throb above his ear as he reached for her. She held his left hand against her cheek, slick with tears. He heard his name tumbling like clean water over him before they dragged him out into the field, pouring some kind of liquor over him, before he lost consciousness again.

  The thought of Jessie, of her warm body, soothing him against the pain, brought Nathan back into the moment. He studied the mounting stack of boards, the saw, the pile of shavings and sawdust on the floor, the angled sun pouring in across the dark dirt floor. Nathan lay down the plane and walked with resolution to the back porch of the big house. He stopped at the steps, where Ginny met him.

  “I needs to speak to Master.”

  “Well, then, come on up,” she said.

  “No, I’ll wait here.”

  Ginny absorbed the steadiness of this man with his stinking arm in the sawdust-covered sling. She wanted to brush the flecks of wood chip from his hair, but restrained herself and went to fetch Judge Matthews.

  The judge was not long. He had expected this visit, dreaded it, come to accept its inevitability. Now Nathan stood before him.

  “I gots to let it go, Judge.”

  “You’re sure, Nathan?”

  “Yes, sir, I’s sure.”

  “I’ll send Benjamin for Dr. Slate. Have you talked to Jessie?”

  “No, sir. I don’t want it in her remembrance, Judge.”

  “I expect you’d better come in,” Judge Matthews said. “Ginny, set up a cot on the side porch, please. Get a clean sheet and have some lint ready. And a bucket. Put some water on to boil. Get some covers. Whatever else you consider needful.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “And, Judge Matthews, you best get that man some whiskey.”

  “Yes, of course. Get the decanter of brandy from my office. And be generous. I’m going to fetch Benjamin.”

  The amputation was clean and efficient. Nathan maintained an eerie silence amid the sounds of the surgery: the faint whisper of the knife, the rasp of the saw, the slight gurgle and the rattle of the bucket as the arm slid into it, separated from him forever. When it was over and the flap of stump had been stitched and bandaged thick with the lint, Nathan turned his head to the wall. He focused on the grain of the wood. He heard them remove the bucket. Through the fog of brandy and pain, Nathan heard Jessie’s wail.

  “Don’t take it, Master. Please, don’t take it.” Jessie’s anguished cry broke the stillness.

  “Now, Jessie, it ain’t him we taking,” Ginny intervened.

  “No, it ain’t him, but sure it’s his. It ain’t garbage.”

  “No, it ain’t. But it’s dead, Jessie. And Nathan gone live. What you wanting done, honey?”

  “Bury it. I wants it buried in a little grave,” Jessie said. “With a cross on it. And a prayer and singing over it. That’s what I want.”

  “All right, Jessie,” Judge Matthews said. “It’s little enough to ask. Benjamin, find a good spot and set Lucian to work.”

  “Yes, sir. And I’ll get Samuel started on a box and a marker,” Benjamin said. “Nobody finer at carving.”

  “Come on up, Jessie,” the judge said. “Come and see your man.”

  She lay across him as she had that other night, her warmth around him like a blanket in the chill. Nathan stroked her hair, ran his fingertips around her ear, felt the softness of her wet cheek against his unshaven stubble.

  CHAPTER 6

  The progressing spring of 1859 was marked with unexpected snow and heavy winds. In spite of the fickle weather, Adeline insisted Charles fetch Emily for Sunday dinners several weeks in a row. In spite of her initial shyness, Emily blossomed in conversation with his mother, a demonstrative affection growing between them that he had never seen before in his family. Charles appreciated the talk around the table, so rare in this house: when might it rain, how the corn was doing, who in town had a new baby, the problem of cutting green firewood in the extended winter. He was studying Emily, when he realized Adeline had addressed him.

  “Nathan is mending well?”

  Charles nodded. “Well, Mama, it helps that the buck is a healthy nigger to start with and left-handed to boot.”

  Emily went still at the word her father had taught her to abhor and cringed inside at its unthinking usage. Her fork hovered in midair.

  Adeline cleared her throat and took a sip of water. “Would you have another helping of turnips?” she asked Emily. “I knew from the time he was a boy Charles would make a doctor,” she said.

  “I never weighed any other possibilities. Had no land, no niggers. Sure didn’t want to be a lawyer, if that’s what you mean.” Charles looked at Emily and smiled. It took her a moment to return his smile.

  Adeline cleared her throat again. “Yes,” she said, “he came to doctoring the way a boy takes a cane and goes to fishing.”

  “Like iron to a magnet, only I didn’t know till I was almost grown that it was medicine calling me. I liked to see things heal. Good thing, I’d say.”

  “How did you know then, Charles?” It hit Emily again how much about this proposed husband of hers she did not know.

  Charles laughed. “Well, we had this old cow one time got caught in a gopher hole, bellowing like mad. Pa and me went running and there she was, stuck as could be. He got her out. Left
front leg, it was, and not broken, but scraped up right bad. We got her to the barn, hobbling and mewling and her bag getting full. So, while Pa milked her, I got a bucket and some lye soap and a rag, and I set to cleaning her up.” He reached for a second piece of cornbread. “There was a right deep cut and some skin chewed up. I ran and asked Mama could I have her sewing scissors, the little ones she still wears around her neck when she’s mending.”

  Adeline smiled.

  “I can remember how Mama’s face looked when she got to the barn, all soft and puzzled-like. So, I cut the loose skin away, easy as I could, with her watching. I must have done all right because the cow didn’t budge. Pa was finished milking and gone by then. Mama handed me some salve out of her pocket and helped me cut a rag in strips. I wound it around and around, thick so the cow’d have some cushion if she bumped it.”

  “He changed that bandage every day for more than a week,” Adeline said, her smile more at the memory than at Charles. “Kept me washing and drying for sure.”

  “That was my first doctoring, I guess. And it suited me. Good thing, since I never had any land to plow. I’ll leave the farming to Will. And Jeremiah, of course.”

  Emily looked across at Adeline, who stood and began to gather the plates. She held up her hand when Emily rose to help, but Emily ignored her, picked up two vegetable bowls, and followed Adeline to the kitchen.

  * * *

  The soft green-gold of evening shone through the canopy of leaves. The heat of the day waned and a cool breeze rose as the sun declined. A few sporadic daffodils persevered erratically between the gnarled roots of the trees. There were so few flowers left at all after Miss Liza’s death sixteen years before. Mainly volunteers gone native. Ginny wandered among them, knife in hand, snipping the last blooms. She was oblivious to Emily’s approach, caught up in the soft air and the light, in her rare moment of being alone to herself. She straightened, her tall, angular form silhouetted against the horizon.