SEASONS STACK ON TOP OF one another and time rolls by as if a single year and not two sandwiched together. We mark the seasons not by temperature so much as by task. Corn goes in before sweet potatoes; sweet potatoes go in before cotton. We rotate planting of the second half of crops with cowpeas or snap beans or oats.
We mourn Alice as if she’s passed on. We take a few of her things to the tree—her comb, a pair of woolen stockings, a brass button—and leave them there, so she’s with us every time we go crossing. Without her, we feel strange and unmoored. The feeling doesn’t pass.
There’s too much rain, there’s not enough rain. We weed and scrape, scrape and weed. Lay some of the corn by and plant again.
That is, until yellow fever comes and lays us low in the summer of 1856, taking both Silas and Miss Lizzie’s youngest, William.
* * *
OUT OF FEAR OF contagion, the two children were buried together far in the woods, much to both mothers’ chagrin. Patience didn’t want her child buried anywhere near William. Though, in life, the two were often tethered, Patience hoped for Silas to be free of the Lucys in death.
Lizzie loudly made it known that she didn’t want young William buried far away in the woods. She told anyone who would listen she wanted him buried close to the house, where she could visit him often and his father would have to bypass that whitewashed cross every day, another reminder of the folly he had brought upon her and her offspring since he’d brought them to this godforsaken place.
Still weak with fever, Patience prepared Silas for burial, refusing all help from the rest of the women. She knew this hurt Nan the most, as she spent more time with him than any of them, but Patience couldn’t help it. “You already got all the time with him,” she told Nan.
The old woman’s face crumpled, but Patience pretended she didn’t see it. She turned her back and waited for the woman to walk away, before she approached the boy’s stilled wrinkled body.
Alone, she washed him, rubbed the small calluses on his feet with oil, cut his hair with a straight razor. The disease had made him tiny again. She dressed him in white, in a shroud Junie and Serah had made, with small crosses and cosmograms stitched around the hem. She made a pocket in the shroud and sewed her new rosary inside it. This one she had made herself with dried seeds and twine and so it seemed the most fitting to accompany him. She washed his face once more and then pulled him into her arms for the last time. He was so light it stunned her. It felt like gathering the air.
The burial was quick, the words too few, and even the few things they said made no sense to her. The Father taketh and giveth. Her boy would be welcomed in heaven as he was not welcomed on earth. The words gave her no comfort.
On the way back, she broke reeds and branches, trying to leave markers so she could find her way back there. She promised herself when there was an ounce more of strength in her body, she would gather the women and they would come back here and move her son. They would bury him elsewhere.
* * *
THERE WAS MORE RAIN, more fever, and even a frightful battle with locusts in the spring of 1857. Nan kept a tally stick, where she marked the occasions, but the rest of us couldn’t read it. And whenever we asked, she’d warn us that the two times the stockman came were different, once before cotton-picking time, and once a ways after, and so if we were looking to the season for clues of an impending third visit, we may not find it there.
Mrs. Lucy gave birth for the fourth time. A baby girl they named Carol. A healthy miracle child arriving on a wave of pestilence. A sure symbol of forthcoming bounty, the Lucys exclaimed.
New neighbors sprouted up to the west and again to the south. Most were small homesteads like ours, but a huge one across the water’s edge loomed large like a small city, with rows of small buildings dotting the horizon. We could sometimes hear their cow horn in the morning, or a jangle of different bells summoning folks for one thing or another all throughout the day.
The Lucys were at odds; she ecstatic, him annoyed. Excited by the prospect of friends again, Mrs. Lucy met all the wives, invited the women and their hands over for quiltings, and took us over to their places for cornhuskings and sheep-shearing parties. Mr. Lucy, however, saw every neighbor as an affront, a wily bastard who stole swaths of land out from under him, land he’d been just on the verge of acquiring the second his fortune turned around.
We no longer asked Nan about the marks on her tally stick. Someone begged her, she wouldn’t say who, to cover over any nicks marking the stockman’s visits. Now, whenever she’s asked to recount the days for us, from the strange freeze that rotted the bolls or that time a hailstorm punched new holes in the roof, the awful fact of Zeke is left out.
It was true we loved these new gatherings with these new neighbors. A cornhusking was alright, but a frolic deep in the woods was even better. A quilting was pleasant, but a church meeting under night sky, packed together in a rickety dark praise house not much bigger than an outhouse, made us all giddy and light-headed. Some of us loved any excuse to be in the company of these others. And we loved them most simply because they weren’t us—they offered up news from the world, stories and songs we hadn’t heard, dances we didn’t know. A lot of them were from Virginia or Maryland, others from Alabama or the Carolinas or Indian Country, and others still were just a foot out of Africa, smuggled into Texas illegally by way of Cuba. They spoke various tongues and creoles, unfamiliar and musical, with different country marks adorning their faces and chests, not to mention different sects of Christians with newfangled crosses and rosaries. Others were Muslims, who carried white prayer shawls wherever they went and dropped to their knees five times a day. But we were most excited by the spiritual professionals: two bona fide Conjurers, each making mojos and protective pouches for any who could pay, and one preaching mystic, who said the Bible had been written on his heart, so we should hold him in higher esteem than any of the traveling missionaries who rolled through the area once a season to bring us the Gospel.
This new community was full of quirks and beliefs that felt foreign and strange. We hadn’t met them all and probably never would. And while some of us embraced that as means to enjoy these folks with a certain temporary abandon, others put up all efforts to remain at a cool shelflike reserve.