ONLY WHEN THE STEAMBOAT TICKETS came, did Junie start to believe the trip to Georgia might be real. She had been summoned to the house that evening to help out while Nan was off midwifing, but once she arrived, Lizzie ushered her past the two squabbling children in the front room and into the bedroom, quickly shutting the door.
The sound of Lizzie forcing the door shut stirred Carol from sleep and she began crying. Lizzie picked her up and stuck a strong-smelling cloth into the child’s mouth. She then sat down on the bed and leaned against the headboard. “My eyes hurt. Read to me,” she said, pointing to a stack of letters on the dresser.
Not since they were girls, back when Lizzie taught her the alphabet, had Junie been asked to read aloud to Lizzie, instead of the other way around. And for a moment, she wondered if it was a trick of some sort. “Please,” Lizzie said.
Junie could see Lizzie’s face was flushed and teary, and maybe a bit swollen on the left side. She started to offer to grab a compress but thought better of it. Every minute in this room was a potential tinderbox. It was best to just do as she was told.
She sat down on a chair and began reading. “‘I say Valencia is a fool to marry a man with nothing to offer her but himself. She’ll find out the hard way, I suppose. Like you did. But I fear she won’t listen to me. Write her and tell her yourself,’” wrote Beatrice, Lizzie’s cousin. “‘Yes, it was rash for Charles to take your wet nurse, but you should have spoken to him first. He has to lead you as Christ leads the Church.’” And between gossip about this person or that, there were details of the bad blood growing between the Lucys, typically over money and mismanagement of the farm. Junie tried to keep the surprise out of her face and read the words in a flat monotone. She knew the Lucys had been fighting a lot recently, but she was amazed to see it laid out so plainly.
“‘It’s important that you all remain united,’” cousin Beatrice went on. “‘Especially in these times.’” Lizzie began blowing her nose loudly. Junie paused and skimmed the next paragraph.
“‘We too have had a panic recently. Some plots of insurrection among the slaves in different counties have come to light. I dare say all of the South must watch out for Northerners in sheep’s clothing . . .’”
As Lizzie wiped her nose, Junie carefully switched to the letter underneath, and resumed reading aloud the moment the sniffling stopped. “‘Dearest sister, I agree,’” wrote Lizzie’s brother, Mason. “‘A visit from you is long overdue. Please find enclosed five tickets from the Blackwell Ferry company, from Houston to Savannah. The man promised me these are exchangeable . . .’”
She heard the words as they came out of her mouth, heard them swirling in the stale air of the bedroom, but until Lizzie pulled out the tickets from between the pages of a beat-up Bible, it didn’t dawn on her fully.
For a moment, she found herself stunned by the array of tickets Lizzie laid on the bed, the bold stark type on the small slips of white paper. She touched one, tracing the lettering with her fingers. March 10th, 1860. It wasn’t a trick. It said just what Mason said it did, just what Lizzie said it would.
“When is that?” Junie asked. Her sense of time was fuzzy. Had always been. If the Lucys had calendars, they were never in plain sight. She could track events and seasons, but not the names of the months or years connected to them.
Lizzie sighed. “Not soon enough.”
Before today, the Visit was a thing over there, but now it was real. She felt it, a transference of some kind. Even after Lizzie pulled the tickets away from her and slipped them back inside the Bible, she still felt the figures under her fingers.
From then on, the trip became a thing inside her. That night, she dreamed of those tickets and who she hoped awaited her on the other side of that long journey. The next day, she pinched herself whenever the thought arose, but the hope kept rising in her chest. There seemed to be no way to stop it. It was sneaky and clever, seeping into moments both busy and quiet, alike. The thrumming of the loom didn’t drown it. Even the work songs she hated didn’t crowd it out.
Little upset her then, because she was already gone. A phantom self was moving around doing what needed to be done on the farm, while the rest of her was in Georgia, sitting with her children in front of the fire, telling them stories. They would be too big to sit in her lap now, but she imagined them that way anyhow, nestled in her arms, her cheek against their hair.
She just needed to get the rest of her body there. Over that big swath of land and that big body of water.
* * *
IT WAS A DAY for churching, but there wouldn’t be any churching, covert or otherwise. Noah’s disappearance had white folks on edge, had them watching everyone as if through a looking glass.
Already, rumors were circulating, and it was easy to guess which ones were started up by Sutton or the Lucys or the Davidson family. The fugitive has been captured, they’d say, each spouting a different horrid demise. He’d been eaten by panthers, sundered by ghosts. He’d been flayed and hanged by voracious thieves and ne’er-do-wells en route to California. Or the soul dealers got him and cut his heel strings, before taking him to work sugarcane in the bowels of Louisiana.
Serah was unsure of what to believe. Each possibility awful and haunting. For a time, she believed each new rumor, held it under her tongue, barely breathing until the next one came. And only then did she give up the former. It wasn’t long before she didn’t believe anything, because of how often they shifted, how widely they differed. She even heard that he had been transferred to Sutton’s ranching property permanently. The most benign rumor of them all, but she didn’t believe it, because Sutton still seemed to be looking for him.
She felt buoyed by the possibility that Noah remained out of their reach. The only thing that punctured that buoyancy was the fraying bracelet around her wrist. Would her binding be his undoing, somehow snapping him back into the vicinity the moment he stepped too far out of range?
She figured the best person to consult might be the root worker, Mariah. And that Sunday, when she saw Harlow’s wagon pull away from the farm, with Monroe and Isaac in tow, she figured it might be the most opportune time to go and visit.
Mariah didn’t live very far away, only about a mile or two north of the creek, tucked away behind a thicket of black willow trees. Serah knew the way, having tagged along with Lulu once, but she’d never had the nerve to try and consult the woman herself.
Even second time around, the sight of Mariah’s place still stunned her. It was a clapboard whitewashed house, with true glass windows covered with bright busy curtains. It had a real sitting porch and a large front yard that was swept and raked daily, its clean furrows still visible.
The front door was closed, and a few people were sitting in the yard, awaiting their turn to speak to Mariah. Serah typically didn’t mind waiting, especially if she could overhear a bit of their conversation, but she knew she couldn’t wait long. She had only a couple of hours before someone would realize she was gone.
Another person came and left, and now there was just one woman in line in front of her. A handsome young man was now pacing the yard, holding a glass bottle out in front of him. Inside the glass, a large spider inched along to the right a few paces. The young man followed the direction of the spider, flattening the distinct lines in the dirt.
“Hey, Elias.” The woman in front of Serah waved and grinned at the man.
He paused and waved back.
“A damn shame,” the woman said to herself, chuckling.
“What is?” Serah asked.
“All that man wasted.” The woman shook her head. She then turned to face Serah. “You know I’m joshing, right?”
“Of course.”
“’Cause I would never go after anything or anybody belonging to Mariah.”
“Of course.” Serah nodded.
Serah had never seen Elias in the flesh until now, but he was the subject of much talk among the neighboring folk. He was Mariah’s husband, and besides him being a handsome, strapping figure, he was also a good ten or fifteen years Mariah’s junior. And while Mariah was known all over the region for her ability to win over stubborn hearts for the unrequited or dissolve once ironclad marital unions, a good deal of women put their stock in her solely because of her hold on young Elias. He was never rumored to have a sweetheart or two on a distant farm the way other men were, nor had anyone ever seen him at a frolic hugged up with anyone other than his wife.
The door flung open wide, and a man staggered out, a dazed expression on his face.
“What you want now, Amy?” a voice said from inside. The woman in front of Serah scurried up the steps and into the house. “Harry try to quit you again?” the voice continued, the door shutting firmly.
If the neighboring women were swayed to believe in Mariah’s powers by her hold on the young husband, the men among the neighboring folk believed in her for different reasons. For them, it was the house, the swath of land it sat upon, and the seemingly hands-off arrangement she had with the man who retained the deeds to both her and the land.
On paper, she and the land were said to be owned by Martin Robison, a senile planter who split his time between Navarro and San Antonio. And it was rumored to be a strictly contractual agreement, for to be a free woman in Texas created new quandaries, as little could be done without a white man’s signature. And so it was a shell game. Robison left her alone and she paid him a small fee annually to cover the taxes of owning her. The land and her mobility were said to be a gift or a payment, depending on who was telling the story, for removing a generational curse from his lineage.
The door flung open again, this time Amy coming out and waving Serah inside.
Mariah stood in the front room and motioned for Serah to sit down at a small table, ornately carved with figures of swimming turtles and slithering snakes. “What brings you, dear?”
To some, Mariah’s appearance was the most beguiling thing about her. She didn’t look like anybody anyone would assume to be powerful. She had soft worn brown skin and sleepy eyes, and she wore her graying hair into two neat plaits on either side of her head. She looked like any regular old granny. A fact that was remarkable, seeing as most two-headed persons and Conjurers were known by their difference. The presence of the gift was usually visible. A shriveled hand or lame foot, shocking blue gums or catlike eyes. Others were fluid beings—shape-shifting and gender variant, like omasenge kimbandas in the old tradition.
Not to mention, she always dressed as if she were on her way to the grandest frolic no one had bothered telling you about. Her blouse was dyed a deep red and her skirt, an intricate weaving of stripes and checkered cloth. A brilliant multicolored blue-and-orange sash was tied around her torso. And if anyone asked her about the mix of color and pattern, if there was a secret to the wondrous ways she put together what would be cacophonous on another body, she’d laugh and say, “Evil follows a straight line. I don’t give it a place to land.”
Serah traced the figures on the surface of the table. One frog in particular captured her eye.
“I said what brings you,” Mariah said, a hint of impatience in her voice.
“How hard is it to break a binding?”
“Depends. On who’s bound and what they been bound with.”
Serah showed her the bracelet and told her its origin story.
“You only used hair, right? No blood?”
“That’s all.”
“It’s not very strong, then. Don’t take much to bust a few strands of hair.”
“Oh . . . that’s good,” said Serah glumly. A weak binding shouldn’t impede him getting farther away, but hearing that only upset her. She couldn’t help seeing an endless ocean materialize before her.
Mariah’s eyes widened. “Honey, you want to make it stronger? If you got something of his, it’s not hard to do.”
“You can?”
“Yeah, it wouldn’t take much. I could web it. That’s the cheapest option. For a little more, I could build a dam . . .” Mariah ran down her list of possibilities, each ritual more elaborate than the one before it. “And then it wouldn’t take much to call him back to you.”
It was tempting, Serah had to admit. “And he’d be unharmed?”
“Can’t promise you that.”
“What can you promise?”
“Can’t promise nothing. The work ain’t certain. It’s just a strong hand guiding things in a favorable direction.”
“Hmph.” She was torn. The carved frog on the table seemed to be waiting. Judging. Just how selfish could she be?
“Do you want it or not?” Mariah peered past Serah toward the window. “’Cause it’s getting late.”
Serah could see the sun setting, a fiery orange spilling into the windows.
“No. He can’t come back here. Not now anyway.”
Mariah shrugged and tapped the frog on the table. “He’ll take your offering.” She stood up and opened the door.
Serah placed a blue bead on the frog’s mouth and was surprised when the grooves in the table kept it from rolling away.
“If you change your mind, you know where I am,” Mariah said, waving goodbye. Serah left the house and hurried back through the woods, the way she had come.