Lapeer County, July 1871
Mary took Nathaniel’s proffered hand and stepped down to the platform at Lapeer Station. Seven-year-old George followed close behind, grasping Jonathan with one hand and Benjamin with the other. The train ride between Detroit and Lapeer was not an arduous one, but it had been taxing for Mary. The boys required constant watchfulness and frequent correction. Growing up on a farm had not prepared her boys for the more refined city life that Detroit had to offer. But when Catherine Balsam had invited her grandsons to the festivities surrounding the long-anticipated dedication of the new City Hall building on the Fourth of July, she couldn’t refuse. The prospect of getting away from it all, even for a few days, was enticing.
The boys had seen little of their grandmother of late as she no longer traveled well. Illness had weakened her constitution, if not her tongue, and this limitation on Catherine’s mobility had proven beneficial for the restoration of Mary’s relationship with Nathaniel. Mary felt sufficiently chastened for her disloyal thoughts and temptations. She didn’t require assistance from her mother-in-law to feel regret and humility. What she needed was to take control once more of her wayward passions.
To that end, she built a buffer around her heart and her person. She tucked all of the letters she had received from George into the hidden compartment in the trunk that had delivered him to her door all those years before. She wrote him no more letters and received none. She spoke to George through a proxy, whoever was handy at the moment. Often this turned out to be Little George. Each time she found herself tempted to think of George, she recounted to herself all of Nathaniel’s many good qualities—his forbearance, his bravery, his fortitude, his principles about the equality of all men, his gentle hand with his children. Bit by bit, Mary found that she could love him. Not with the obsessive love she had felt for George, but love nonetheless.
The trip to Detroit was the first time their family had ever been alone together, without the company of the former slaves who had found refuge on their farm. Lacking a house full of people and problems to distract her, Mary discovered things about her boys she had not previously noticed. Her youngest, Benjamin, had taken to calling all adults by their first names as he did with the Negroes at home. Mary thought she might die of shame when he said to his grandmother, “Catherine, these are good biscuits, but not so good as the ones Mama Martha makes.” Jonathan said little at all. Salutations, pleases, and thank-yous were all he offered most of the time. George, on the other hand, had an opinion about everything, usually a critical one.
As they loaded their luggage onto the back of the wagon for the trip home from the train station, Little George took one look at who was driving the horses and said, “Why are you here? Where’s Jacob?”
Big George tucked a canvas over the top of the luggage and answered without looking at the boy. “Jacob’s gotten himself some poison ivy on his hands. Can’t control the reins until it heals.”
Little George snorted his disapproval.
“How dreadful,” Nathaniel said. “Where was it?”
“Got it when he was out in the woods snaring rabbits.”
During the ride back to the farm, Mary stared out at the countryside. With every passing year, more of the land came under cultivation. Trees were felled, fences built, furrows plowed. Acre by acre, the outside world was encroaching on her little kingdom. Nathaniel looked upon this progress as proof of God’s blessing. But to Mary, more people meant more criticism—and more danger. Every outsider who settled in the community was one more person to whom the Balsam way of life had to be explained and defended.
Just a few weeks earlier, Little George had come home from a trip to town with Big George, hot, angry tears running down his cheeks. “Henry Rutherford called me a nigger lover! He said I’ve got their fleas! And he said you and Big George—”
Mary clapped her hand over her son’s mouth in horror before he could finish that sentence and dragged him to the backyard, where she washed his mouth out with soap and whipped his bare backside with a razor strap.
“I don’t care that you didn’t say it first,” Mary said through his howls. “We do not talk that way in this family.”
Half a dozen farmhands looked on as Little George was thus humiliated. The boy didn’t speak to his mother for a week afterward, and ever since he had been more surly than usual with all of the farmhands, but especially with Big George.
Always Mary had been careful to ask George and the others to attend to a task. Nathaniel, used to commanding enlisted men once he became an officer, tended to order the farmhands around. Little George had clearly picked up on this method and had taken to giving orders like a foreman.
When the wagon rolled up to the house that evening, Little George jumped down and walked around to the driver’s seat. “Better get this all inside and then wipe down those horses, George.”
“George!” Mary snapped.
“I told you I want to be called Jack,” Little George said.
“Your name is George,” Nathaniel said. “And you leave the orders to me, understand?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy mumbled. “Come on,” he said to his brothers. “We better get upstairs before Mother gives our beds away to more of them.”
The two younger boys obediently followed their older brother up the front porch steps and inside the house.
“I’m sorry about that,” Nathaniel said as he grasped one end of a trunk and Big George grasped the other. “I’m sure the lad is just tired after a long day of travel.”
George nodded but said nothing.
Later that evening, Mary raised her hand to the doorknob outside the boys’ bedchamber to kiss them good night. But Little George’s voice on the other side of the door made her pause. It was difficult to make out what he was saying.
She opened the door. “What are you talking about in here?”
All three boys looked to their mother in the doorway. Jonathan and Benjamin looked as if they had just been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. George was calm, and Mary wondered if that was the slightest hint of a smile she saw playing at the side of his lips.
“Nothing, Mother. Just saying our prayers.”