CHAPTER 9
At the end of his morning appointments, Charles came into the dining room, where Emily was fiddling at unnecessary adjustments to a napkin. With his hands behind him and a mischievous smile on his lips, he bent to kiss Emily’s cheek.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
She did, smiling back. Since his self-absorption in their early union, he had gradually begun to court her physically. Emily cherished surprise moments like this. The somberness in her father’s home had robbed her of a sense of play in childhood. She had grown up old. Charles’s frolicsome capers, though sometimes outrageous, were a restitution of sorts. Emily hid behind her eyelids and waited.
“Open your mouth.”
She felt the skin first, heavy on her lips, without much taste.
“Wider.”
The bulging skin slid between her teeth.
“Now,” Charles said, “suck it in.”
The almost-sweet juice burst onto her tongue, the soft, seedy fruit of the fig. Emily laughed and juice spilled from the corner of her mouth. She reached to wipe at it with the napkin, but Charles’s mouth was on hers. Emily tried to stifle her laugh, but failed and sprayed them both with fig and juice. Charles retreated, each of them hanging to the corners of the napkin, the dark juice on her face and in his beard. She swatted the napkin at him and pushed him away, pointing and laughing at his splattered face.
“First fig of the season,” Charles said. “Just couldn’t let it go to waste!”
Emily swallowed, bending over, until she could get her breath.
“You are the devil’s own imp, I declare,” she said.
“And you the temptation. You could make a man fall, you could.”
Charles kissed her again, this time with an urgent hunger. Emily put her arms around him, responding, then pulled back. “It’s dinnertime,” she said. “Ginny will be coming any moment.”
Charles pinned her against the doorpost, his arms stretched out to the sides. He straddled her skirts between his long legs. She wriggled to get free.
“Not till I have my kiss.” Charles took her chin in his hand, bent his mouth to hers.
“Open your eyes,” he said. “I want to see you watching me kiss you.”
Emily opened her eyes. She saw him watching what she was feeling. She had never felt so naked. He slid his hand down her back, into the pleats of her skirts.
“You wear too many petticoats, Mrs. Slate. I believe I’ve said that before.”
“The better to shield myself from the likes of you, Dr. Slate.”
“You will never succeed at that, Mrs. Slate. Now, perhaps you would feed a starving man his dinner.”
The back door creaked and slammed. As she ducked out of his arms, Charles kissed her on the cheek. She reached for a steaming dish in Ginny’s hands.
“I am a hungry man,” he said to no one in particular. “Give me sustenance to heal a broken world this afternoon.”
Ginny turned her back and set the bowl of crowder peas on the edge of the table, hot pot liquor sloshing onto her hand and dripping onto the red-checked cloth. She slid the bowl away from the table’s edge and dabbed at the spots with her apron. Emily reached across and touched her hand.
“You all right, Ginny?”
“Yes’m. I be fine.” She straightened her back and looked into Emily’s face as if to assure herself what she might find there. Wiping at her hand with the apron, she flapped it once as if to clear the air.
“Is there much more to bring? I’ll come and help you.”
Ginny shook her head and brushed the words aside as if she were shooing a fly.
“No, Miss Emily. I don’t need you. You just sit down here with the good doctor while he gather himself up for the afternoon. I be right back.”
Ginny knew she risked being too caustic. She bit her cheek as she turned, not daring another look at him. Slave gossip traveled thick and fast, and she’d heard more than she wanted as to where he spent his Thursday afternoons, his horse hitched around the corner from the brothel far longer than warranted for doctoring. The knowledge of it was burdensome, her feelings and loyalties mixed and churning. This was white folks’ doings and she was a slave. But Emily had been half hers to rear: her sister-child. It was impossible to reconcile her protective instincts with the limits of her station. What a thought that was: the limits of her station. Yet ever present, even in this household. What if she did divulge what she’d heard? What purpose would it serve? Emily would still be his wife and a wife then burdened as well. Perhaps she was already. How could Ginny know what Emily might suspect? And how could Ginny be sure her suspicions amounted to any more than suspicion? She couldn’t. Nor could she relieve its weight on her by putting it off on Emily. No, she would simply fetch the chicken and the cornbread and bring them to the table. Ask was there anything else they needed and then disappear. Same as he would do right after the meal.
* * *
The winds of August 1859 brought a touch of relief from the oppressive heat and a sure hint of fall, especially the evening winds. Emily loved the wind. She always had. She thought of a story Ginny loved to tell about her when she was a toddler. Her mother had been changing her clothes, when she caught sight of the treetops blowing outside the window. As her mother turned to get fresh underthings and a pinafore, Emily had darted down the steps and into the yard, flying naked through the wind, arms outstretched, twirling in the gale.
Emily released herself now to the wind’s insistent embrace. She swayed, arms raised, eyes closed, leaning into the force of its magnitude. When the rain came, she stayed, letting its needles penetrate her clothing until she was wet through.
From the house kitchen, Ginny watched and waited. The teakettle sizzled on the stove. A homespun gray wool blanket lay across a chair back. When at last Emily came inside, the heavy indigo of her skirts left a trail of water across the floor. Ginny wrapped her in the blanket and handed her a cup of tea before mopping up the puddles.
“Ginny,” Emily said, “I have a baby in me now.”
“You sure?”
A faint smile played across Emily’s face.
“How sure?” Ginny stood still in front of her, challenging.
“I’m sure, Ginny. Really, I’m a woman now. I’m not a girl anymore.”
“I know.” Ginny dropped her wet rag onto the side counter. “Well?” She waited. “How you feel about this baby you got in you?”
“Now, Ginny, what kind of question is that? I expect I feel like any other expectant mother. A bit sick of a morning—”
Ginny interrupted. “I thought so. I been watching. And what else?”
“So glad, Ginny. Really, I’m so happy.”
Ginny studied her from the other side of the worktable. “You ain’t afraid? You got to be afraid, Miss Emily. You know right down to the bone about birthing. Happy is fine, for sure. Babies do make us happy. Tired, too. Up half the night. You don’t know that part yet. But you know the other and you best not be fooling around with me. I been there with you.”
A long silence followed. Emily held the teacup to her lips like a shield, set it down, and dropped her head.
“Yes.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Yes.” She raised her chin and looked directly at Ginny. “Yes, I’m afraid. But there is no cure for that, Ginny. And I’m not going to die. I’m not. I’m going to love this child, and I’m going to be right there and I’m never going to not be there for her.”
“Now, how you know it’s her? You got second sight.”
Emily rose and let herself be held in Ginny’s arms. “No, what I’ve got is wishful thinking. And courage, if I can muster it.”
“You can. You been doing it all your life.”
* * *
Adeline opened the door to Emily’s knock days later and beckoned her in. She put her arms around this young woman who had entered her life with such ease. She pondered how much more comfortable she felt with Emily than with her own daughter. But then, Belinda was a case unto herself. Always had been.
Yet even with Emily, she was aware of her reticence. Is that what I am, she thought, reticent? Well, we both of us are reticent, in different ways. What does that even mean, anyway: wary, secretive, uncommunicative? And why? I learned to keep my mouth shut, Adeline thought; open it and something bad was bound to happen. She shook her head and motioned Emily through the hall and out the back to the kitchen, where she drew the iron kettle from the hearth and poured two cups of tea.
Emily took a sip and smoothed her skirt over her lap. “I hope to lay your first grandchild in your arms in the spring,” she said.
Adeline set down the cup, her face unexpectedly grave. The thought of loving another child brought unexpected fear rather than joy, especially as the prospect of war loomed over their lives. “And you are feeling well?” she said.
“I keep cold biscuits by the bed and hardly dare to turn my head until I’ve had a few bites of a morning. Other than that, I’m fine.”
“Well, then. Let us hope this is the first of many,” Adeline said.
“Did you come from a large family?” Emily said. “I suddenly realize how little I know about your family. Charles’s family, really.”
Adeline’s laugh had a slightly bitter edge to it. “The better for it, likely.” She took a sip of her tea. “It’s not such a pretty story, Emily.”
“But now it’s my family as well, Adeline.”
“Families often know little about one another.”
“I know what an intelligent woman you are. That much is no secret.”
“I taught myself all I know, Emily. And not in the most admirable way. As a child I was sent to do day work for the town doctor—not the most reputable of men, I might add.” Memories flooded Adeline—a handful of women with little coughs or headaches that defied the repeated treatment on their frequent visits, their moans through the door of the examining room, the doctor moaning, too. He had moaned a great deal with certain ones. And sometimes with a strange gentleman who appeared irregularly. She had known what the treatment was, same as her father imposed on her mother, only her mother’s moans were different, stifled and painful. Adeline shook her head, pulled herself back into the room. “I sneaked books from his house all the time and read and read and read. He never missed those books. I think they were mainly for show. And I listened when he talked. He was articulate in spite of himself. I was just a child who worked in the house. He didn’t even know I was there. I was invisible to him.”
“It’s hard to imagine you as invisible.”
“There were plenty of other times I wished I truly were, Emily—at home.”
“What was at home, Adeline?”
“What was not at home is more the question.”
“What was not at home?”
“Love. Love was not at home. Remember, Emily, you asked.” Adeline set down her empty cup. “My pa was mean as a snake. Maybe meaner. He had a temper you didn’t want to see. Or hear. One time he beat the wall and broke his hand. It turned all purple and was never right after that.” She took a deep breath. “So then he took to using his belt or a stick of kindling from the woodbox or whatever else came to hand. I had a brother never learned to keep his mouth shut, always bruised and having bloody eyes. One day when I was at the doctor’s, he died, my brother did. I didn’t see him. They had him in the box, nailed shut, when I got home. They said he fell and broke his neck. He may have. He was always falling. So he may have. But I never really knew.”
Adeline studied her daughter-in-law. What about this girl made her willing to be vulnerable? Adeline saw the cup trembling in Emily’s hand.
“What did you do, Adeline?”
“Kept my mouth shut. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, I would.”
“I got cagey, Emily. And reticent. Reticent has dignity to it. Cagey sounds like an animal. I felt like an animal sometimes. Like an animal caught in a cage. Some kind of cat maybe. I remember seeing a bobcat caught like that once. No way out. And that’s how I felt. No way out. And all I wanted was to get away.”
“Is that how you came to marry Thomas?”
“That is exactly how I came to marry Thomas. He came around one day hauling wood and I was sent to let him in. He was a little thing for a grown-up boy. Always small. But he had eyes like that cat. Wide open. Wide open and looking at me. And then he smiled. He had these pretty lips like I wished I had myself. Heavy lips on that skinny face. Nobody ever smiled at me like that. And I was hooked. Like a fish on a string. Just caught and him playing with the line to watch me flipping every which way, fighting to get away. I reckon I was. Only not away from him.”
Adeline smiled at Emily then. “So after a while one day when he came to haul some more wood, I helped him get it piled up. We didn’t either one of us say anything, but when we got done, he put his arm around my waist and kissed me. I climbed up in the wagon and we drove away.”
Without taking her eyes from Adeline’s face, Emily set her cup in the saucer.
“I figure I was with child—that would have been Charles—by the time we got a preacher, though it wasn’t all that long, maybe just a week or two. I wasn’t paying much attention to the time. I was listening at the door of myself—hearing me and him and I loved it. I loved my Thomas, who had saved me from my life and let me out my cage.” Adeline stood and took the empty cup from Emily.
“I’m sorry about your brother.”
“I had five brothers. There were eleven of us. More than one who died. Only six of us got full grown.” Why was she telling all this? What was it in this girl that elicited so much trust? Was it the unprecedented emotion of a first grandchild? The unpredictable dangers of pregnancies and childbirth and children? Adeline hesitated. She would be still now. She would not go further with these revelations, these secrets even her own children had never known.
The silence in the room demanded something to fill it.
“One died because of me.”
“Because of you?” Emily leaned forward to the edge of her seat. “You don’t have to tell me this, Adeline. But I am willing to hear, if you wish.”
“I never talked about it in my life.” Adeline faced Emily, her hands braced behind her on the table edge. Yes, this young woman was strong enough to hear her. “Pa was teaching me to stand the wagon. I was afraid and I kept sitting down. He was in a rage. Made me get down and stand there in the field, just stand, holding my skirt up while he hunted for a stick. My brother came running and climbed up in that wagon. He was younger than me, but good with the wagon, and he stood up there and smiled. He flicked the reins and turned around, smiling at me, and the wagon hit a rock. He was still looking at me when he fell, looking like he had a big surprise and couldn’t quite decide if it was good. He held on to the reins and they jerked him around and the wheel went over his neck. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t make a sound, but I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t stop looking at that body that wasn’t my brother anymore. I didn’t even know who that was. And the next day, after we buried him, I stood that wagon and I’ve stood it ever since.”
“Oh, Adeline.” Emily rose and extended her arms to her mother-in-law. Adeline let herself be held, let herself cry the long-withheld tears.