CHAPTER 11
After the early months of sickness, Jessie’s tiny body began to round. Ginny noted it, as she had noted the sickness that Jessie struggled to hide. Ginny had an eye for life. After dinner one day, when the dishes were washed and the kitchen cleaned, she spoke.
“Your man taken note on this yet?”
“On what?” Jessie said.
“That baby you carrying?”
“No, he ain’t.” Jessie bent over some unnecessary task, chipping at an imaginary spot with her broken thumbnail.
“Why you keeping this from your man, Jessie? He done been through hell. He could do with a little good news about now.”
Jessie looked up, her expression hard, her eyes glittering. Ginny studied her face. Ginny’s embrace was awkward, her tall, lean form bending over the diminutive woman as over a child.
“He gone know it soon enough. Best you tell him now. You don’t have to tell him the size of it, if you don’t want. But he a man, Jessie. He a black diamond of a man.”
“He don’t need no more to carry, Ginny.”
“Ain’t you carrying that empty sleeve with him every day? Ain’t you carrying it together, just like you buried that arm together?”
Jessie nodded.
“You hoping he’ll believe it’s his?”
Jessie shook her head. Ginny held her at arm’s length.
“It ain’t like he won’t carry this then. How you think that man gone feel when he find out you trying to carry this heavy load without him? Won’t be long now ’fore he see it for himself, honey. He gone be all right with that? Mayhap he noticed already. You thinking you can spare him?”
“Maybe.”
“Then, I expect you best get over that and tell him now. Every day he ain’t helping you carry this gone be a day he regret.”
Jessie raised her chin and looked away.
“I’ll be at your cabin after supper,” Ginny said. “Your childrens gone spend the night with Ginny. Now get that broom and go to work on the porch before I has to go tell the judge he done wasted his money on you.”
* * *
From the parlor door, Emily watched Belinda remove the vase from its shelf. She held it close to her face, as she did everything, refusing to wear spectacles except in secret. Emily had glimpsed her with them only a handful of times at school and suspected her failure to wear them in class contributed to Belinda’s struggle with her marks. For several minutes, Emily did not speak.
“It was my mother’s,” she said, finally.
Startled, Belinda fumbled the vase back into place. Below it, Emily could see the carved face of the fox peaking from the intricate design of wooden leaves on the shelf bracket.
“My father brought it to her from New Orleans, before they were married.”
“It is beautiful,” Belinda said. She scooped up the green silk ruffles of her skirt. “You must cherish it. Well, of course, you would. I don’t know why I said that.”
“I do cherish it, Belinda. I have so little of her.” Emily reached up, tracing the outline of a glass rose with her fingertip. “Sometimes, I try to remember things, but I know it’s mostly just imagination on my part: some expression on her face, her hand picking up a hairbrush, the way she might have threaded a needle. Sometimes my father mentions things, how she loved to paint and sew. But the larger things are only stories of her. Stories that I make into a memory of sorts, memories of stories. Imagination. But then things slide away. Her face is just a tintype. Her expression never changes and her eyes don’t blink.”
“I can’t imagine. Well, actually, I guess I can imagine. Of course, I can. Anyone can imagine anything they want, but it would only be, like you say, imagination. Although I do have a vivid imagination. Oh, Emily, it would be like trying to imagine how turnips taste if you’d never had a bite of them.”
“Yes, something like that, I suppose.” Emily laughed.
“You never mention it, Emily. Her death, I mean. Were you there?”
“No—I mean, yes. Ginny tells me I was, but I don’t remember.” Emily fingered the gold locket that held a snip of her mother’s hair. “I can’t think about it, Belinda. But sometimes, it just comes on me.”
She halted, opening the locket, fingered her mother’s hair, and snapped the locket shut. “Sometimes I imagine myself there, but it goes into a kind of blankness. It’s red and it’s dark and it has no horizon. It makes me so afraid. It’s something I smell. I’m afraid I will go there and not ever come back.”
“Oh, Emily,” Belinda said, her hand flapping uselessly in the air between them, “there I go again. I do not understand myself. Really, I don’t. How things go popping out of my mouth the way they do. I should be ashamed.”
“No, Belinda.” Emily laid her hand on the wide plaid of Belinda’s empress sleeve. “Please, it’s not your fault. It’s me. Don’t fret.”
Belinda turned away. “All right, I won’t,” she said. “But that is just awful. And what about Will? Was he there?”
Emily stared at Belinda, almost through her. She sighed and rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead.
“No,” she said. “He was away at school. We never discuss it. I see it in him, though, and Jeremiah. Especially Jeremiah—the way he gets sometimes and can’t be still, as if there is no ground to hold him up.”
“You talking about me?” Jeremiah whipped into the room like a horse in a brushfire.
“Belinda was admiring Mama’s vase.”
“And how exactly did my name come into that?”
“I was telling Belinda how differently each of us miss her.”
“Well, I don’t miss her. She was gone when I got here. And I don’t give a whit for vases and such,” he said, jerking it from the shelf. “She ain’t in that vase. She ain’t anywhere, as I know of.”
Jeremiah thrust the vase back onto the shelf, its gilt edge protruding from the rim. He leaned against the wall, arms crossed, one foot propped atop the wide baseboard. As he shifted, his arm shot out for balance. The back of his hand made contact with the vase. It shifted. Jeremiah caught his balance. The vase plummeted in a blur of green and rose and gold. Belinda reached for it, but it was beyond her. Emily watched the pieces fly apart. She saw each piece glide up and out as it hit, saw how whatever space it once contained no longer existed.
Emily picked up a shard of glass. On it remained one almost-intact rose. She studied it, holding it up to the light. She put it in Jeremiah’s hand and closed his palm around the jagged sliver.
“No,” Emily said, “she wasn’t in the vase.”
* * *
Jessie’s baby girl was born in the early days of December 1859. An almost-Christmas baby, she was light as milk coffee, red-faced from crying, with a full head of dark kinky hair, frosted at the ends with a coppery glow. Ginny handed the baby, cut free and cleaned, to her mother. She watched as Jessie studied this strange child who had entered the world through her body.
“Where’s Nathan?” Jessie said.
“Outside.”
“You best show him this baby, Ginny.” Jessie’s voice was tired and defeated.
Ginny wrapped the child and walked onto the stoop. Nathan stood with his back to the cabin. He did not turn around. She stood watching until she sensed a bit of give to his shoulders. She crossed in front of him, laid the baby in his elbow, and pulled back a corner of the swaddling. Nathan’s eyes went narrow. He stared at the pale, bundled face for endless minutes. The baby opened her eyes and blinked, searching for something beyond him. Nathan did not raise his face, but Ginny saw the grimace, the constricted jaw.
“You got yourself a daughter, Nathan,” Ginny said, “if you want her.”
Nathan handed the baby back, leaped from the porch, and ran. Ginny watched him go. The darkness swallowed him.
Inside the cabin, Jessie slept. Ginny fixed a little sugar tit, pulled her chair to the hearth, and rocked the baby, crooning. Jessie did not wake.
The hours dragged into morning and then past noon, the sun high overhead, its light unrelenting, before Nathan reappeared. He stood in the door with his head bowed before walking quietly across the room. He reached out his arm for the baby and folded her into the crook of his arm. He lifted his stump to caress the little face.
“Look like this gal wearing a halo,” Nathan said, his soft voice breaking.
Awake now, Jessie studied Nathan’s face. He came across to the bed, leaned down to his wife, nestling the infant into her arms. He dragged his fingers across the blanket covering Jessie, up her cheek, her forehead. He laced his fingers through the thick crown of her hair and kissed her full on the mouth.
“Yep,” he said, “got her a little halo, just like her mama.”
The baby’s curled fists flailed against her tiny lips. Mouth wide, she burrowed after her mother’s scent, rooting insistently. Jessie opened her shift and gave her small breast to the child.
“What name she gone have?” Nathan poked at the fire.
“You say, Nathan,” Jessie said.
“All right.” He hesitated, scratching his beard. “Knew a white slave from down Louisiana once named Aimee. Said it meant she was loved. This gal gone be Aimee.”
Jessie nuzzled the baby’s open palm.
“Aimee,” she whispered. “She gone be loved.”