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.
“Miss Emily. What you doing out here?”
“Wandering, Ginny.” Emily realized how infrequently she paid real attention to Ginny’s height. It was so familiar. And regal when she noticed. “Just glad the winter’s finally decided to give up and get gone.”
“You be wishing for it back come many weeks. Hot don’t tell what summer gone be like.”
Emily laughed and bent to pick up a daffodil that had slipped from Ginny’s hands. She pulled its bare stem between her fingers. “Ginny, Dr. Slate wants me to marry him.”
“He do now? You say that like it’s news.” Ginny wiped her brow. “And what is it you want, Miss Emily?”
Surprise flitted across Emily’s face. “I don’t know.” She chewed at a hangnail. “Ginny, do you ever think of marriage?”
“No, I don’t.” Ginny allowed the knife and the flowers to hang by her side.
“Don’t you want a man? Don’t you ever wonder?”
“No, I don’t wonder, Miss Emily.”
Emily watched as Ginny leaned forward and cut another thin daffodil.
“I ain’t got to wonder. After Master sold my mama, his boy got hold of me. He was some kind of mean. Worse than mean; he was the devil in flesh. I don’t never want no man near me again. Not as I can help. And now I can. Back then I was just a child. And all alone.”
Emily put her hand on Ginny’s arm and Ginny covered it with her own. History makes a mockery of us, Emily thought. All the years of their deep connection and Emily never suspected. Had she been oblivious? So lost in herself. Lost being where she found herself presently. Finding oneself lost, what paradox, Emily thought. I must find myself where I am and stop the fantasy of where I ought to be.
“I’m so sorry, Ginny.”
“You ain’t had nothing to do with it. Why you sorry?”
“I’m sorry not to have known, to have been so caught up in my own life.”
“Honey, I never told it. Hope I never showed it. And you got some things to be caught in.”
“But nothing, Ginny, nothing even close—”
“No, you got your own. We each got our own wilderness to travel. Moses out there forty years. Ain’t never seen the Holy Land. But the people did. You can’t travel my wilderness and I can’t travel yours. Not much I know, Miss Emily. But here’s something I believe I do know. You take care of your own crazy place and I take care of mine, and somehow together we make the world a little bit safer place to wander in.” Ginny handed Emily another daffodil. “Now,” she said, “what you want to do about your life?”
“No one has ever asked me what I want, Ginny. Not like that.” Emily pulled the bare stem through her fingers again. “No one asked me did I want to go to the Yalobusha Female Institute. But I went anyway. No one asked what church I wanted to attend. Or did I even want to. No one asked if I want to get married. But I don’t want to wind up a spinster.”
“Um-hmm. Nobody asked you nothing? You sure?”
“Oh, they asked did I want the solid yellow silk or the green plaid. Or both. Or did I want empress sleeves on my dress? Or did I want fried chicken or ham at Sunday dinner, or both? But, Ginny, no one has ever asked me what I want about the things that determine my life. I can’t imagine how to think about such a question.”
Ginny leaned forward to cut another two blooms. She is like a great, long-legged heron, Emily thought, all grace. Ginny handed the flowers to her.
“You got three choices now,” she said. “Just like those three flowers in your hand. You can go right on letting everybody ’round you say what you must do. That’s one. You can say you ain’t doing it. That’s two. Or you can ponder what you want and say it out loud. And that’s three.”
“Ginny, I don’t know how to know what I really want.”
“Yes, you do.” Ginny tilted her head and studied her young mistress. “And besides that, I ain’t sure what your papa thinks about them Slates. While you thinking on things, let me hear what you think about Charles Slate?”
“He’s charming. Intelligent, ambitious.”
“He good to women?”
“He seems well-mannered.” Emily hesitated, tapping a daffodil against her skirt. “Belinda used to hint—no, more than hint—that he was quite a ladies’ man. Sometimes she seemed to gloat on it.”
“She say that, do she? But you don’t believe her?” Ginny stood up tall.
“Belinda’s apt to say most anything, if it suits her at the moment. I never give much credence to what Belinda says. One thing one minute and the opposite the next.”
“He kind to his sister?”
“She said not, said he was always mean to her. Like Jeremiah with me.”
“You seen it yourself?”
“Well, no, Ginny. I’ve never been around them together.”
“So you don’t know what’s true. And you don’t know what you want.” Ginny straightened her shoulders. “The difference in me and you is, you can choose. And since you can, you ought to know. And maybe you gone find that what they think you want and what you do want turn out to be the same. And maybe not. And that’s all I got to say on that.” Ginny stretched. “Now, give me them daffodils so I can get them in some water before I done wasted all my time out here. And you go wander ’round in your head for a while. Won’t take you no forty years.”
Emily’s thoughts were indeed a wilderness and she found herself lost in them. She was all aflutter, as the expression went, with Charles’s attentions, and his charm made her laugh. She yearned for laughter. He had even taught her some rudimentary dance steps, and she had learned them quite well in spite of feeling clumsy. He focused on her in a way that not even her father did, though Charles could be sometimes unpredictably abrupt, even somewhat harsh. He was handsome in a slightly off-kilter way, boyish still, though enough older to have his medical practice established. He was a good doctor, if his treatment of Nathan were any example. Yet, she felt discomfited and sometimes invisible in his presence.
Now this choice: not a thing she had ever envisioned. All around her, girls grew up, got married, and had children, often by the dozen. If a woman lived, she grew old. If not, she died, like Emily’s mother. Or her husband died and the woman married again. Her children had children, or they died. The woman grieved and went on. Or no suitors appeared and she became a spinster, someone’s maiden aunt. What other choice had there ever been?
Emily was young and inexperienced. Except for boarding school, she had never been away from home. The unfamiliar made her anxious: a different home, different people around her, responsibility for a household to manage. Perhaps Ginny was right. Perhaps she might not want to be married. Not to Charles and not to anyone. Was that possible? The life she imagined was the life she had lived: life with Charles as an extension of the life she had experienced. Only she would not be lonely. Except for Ginny and her attentive, but vaguely unknowable father, Emily had been forever lonely. She yearned to be known, to be understood and accepted, to share herself with another. She yearned for everything that seemed to define a normal life: husband, home, children. Yet she carried in her an underlying apprehension of being with a man, of bearing children. The raw physical hunger of Charles’s attentions, his blatant dismissal of convention both enflamed her and frightened her. As Emily examined Ginny’s question, her stomach constricted; her breathing shallowed; her fear amplified into anxiety that bordered on panic. Emily fought the irrational urge to flee from herself. The reality that she had a choice, must in fact make a choice that would determine the remainder of her life, invaded her body, growing exaggerated and ominous.
Ginny found her behind the shed, counting chickens and sobbing.
“What you doing out here, Miss Emily?”
“Ginny?” Emily looked around like a lost child.
“Honey, why you crying like this?” Ginny reached for her.
“I don’t know. I truly don’t.” Emily shook her head against Ginny’s arm. “I’m so afraid that I feel crazy.”
“Let’s you and me go set down on the bench and have us a talk now, honey. You ain’t crazy. But you got reason for your fears. You gone be all right.”
“I can’t do this, Ginny. I want to, but I can’t.”
“Be married?”
Emily nodded. “Something is wrong with me, Ginny, something not like other women. I feel all torn up inside. It gets too much and I just go blank. Like when I got my first blood.”
“You got cause, Miss Emily. And me to blame. You just don’t remember.” Ginny hesitated, struggling with what to tell. “I’ve told you about me; now I’m gone tell you about you. You was there when your mama died.”
Emily jerked her head, staring at the precision of Ginny’s profile.
“They let me say goodbye to her?”
“No, didn’t nobody let you do nothing but me. I was supposed to be watching you, but I wasn’t maybe twelve years old myself and I got to playing and let you get away. And when I found you, it wasn’t no pretty sight. I’m sorry for that.” She reached over and took Emily’s hand, but did not turn her head. “And now I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Just tell me plain.”
“Didn’t nobody ever know but me and whoever was tending your mama. I don’t remember who it was. I found you in there. I reckon you seen the whole thing. Wasn’t nobody paying attention except to Miss Liza lying there dead, and that baby crying. And there you was right in the middle of it, them women keening and all that blood.”