Astray: Stories Page 5
Why, a halfwit of thirteen could have seen through Mrs. Gomez’s performance! The signs shone out now as if carved on the pale gray sky over the harbor. The missing corpse; the unavailable documents. Oh, he did write a will? The shows of ignorance. I’d prefer the whole sum in gold. The pleas for urgency. To turn the page. She’d appealed to Huddlestone’s vanity, and to his gallantry. His avarice. His sweaty dreams.
He walked back up Dock Street like a frail old man, jostled by the crowd. She’d practically waved the truth in his face: The sooner the better. I mean to do all that money can. Why had the Jewess played such a terrible trick on her husband, he wondered dizzily? Had Gomez been miserly, malicious, a brute? I tried to perform my duty, she said coolly in Huddlestone’s head, I ran his household. We were not so blessed. What could the merchant have done to deserve being robbed of his whole life’s estate?
The strange thing was, it struck him, the will had been dated only last year. Could adoration have gone septic so fast? What was the hard black cherry pit at the core of their marriage?
Unless she’d forged the document, somehow. It struck Huddlestone that he’d underestimated the education of Sephardic girls. Those two taciturn men who’d testified in court that they’d seen Gomez sign the will, could they have been her accomplices? Her lovers? His imagination reeled.
Most likely he would never know. But of course he didn’t really care about her treachery to Gomez. She’d betrayed Huddlestone, her husband-who-might-have-been, when he’d only meant to help her. She’d robbed three weeks from his life, but it felt as if he’d been in her thrall forever. Women act more privately, more obscurely, she’d remarked. According to the dictates of the heart. Was that a coded warning? Such excess of kindness—lavished on an undeserving woman. Had she been laughing at him all along, or had there been some true regret mixed in with the fake? I can’t sleep, sir, she’d told him, I can’t find any peace. I can only say how sorry I am for all the trouble to which I’ve put you. Such sad eyes. He needed to believe one line at least, a single shard saved from the wreckage.
He would always be puzzling now, always doubting. Never understanding the real story. Liverpool, Rotterdam, Lisbon, the Cape? Never knowing where in the world she’d gone.
As Huddlestone mounted the stairs to his apartment, and let himself fall onto his bed, it came to him that he would live and die a bachelor.
The Widow’s Cruse
We hear that the wife of a certain Merchant of this city, while her husband was in the country, broke open his scrutore, and took out his will, of which she was executrix; and went in widow’s weeds to Doctor’s Commons, under a pretence that he was dead, and prov’d the same; by virtue whereof she receiv’d all his money in the stocks, and is gone over sea.
New York Weekly Journal (May 26, 1735)
This intriguing sentence was preserved by Carol Berkin and Leslie Horowitz in their Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives: Documents in Early American History (1998). Huddlestone and Mrs. Gomez are fictional members of two real New York families, bottom-drawer lawyers and Sephardic merchants respectively.
TEXAS
1864
LAST SUPPER AT BROWN’S
Before the War there’s two women in the house but last year Marse done took them to auction. Now’s just me, the cook and all-round boy. My name Nigger Brown, I don’t got no other, I was born here. Missus done came in the kitchen this morning, unlock the butter barrel. Law, she say, that’ll be gone in a week.
She don’t call me boy, like Marse do. She don’t call me nothing. She only marry Brown a couple years back, too late for chillun. Some say hims took her for the money from her laundry but she ain’t ugly, I done seen worse. I say, Maybe I make you some ash cakes?
Ash cakes, are they colored fixings?
I tells her, Taste real fine. All’s I need is meal, water, pinch of lard.
Missus smile, almost. Very good. How much flour’s left?
Less ‘n a barrel.
She jangling her keys like a rattle. She know she ain’t quality, she still got laundress hands. She come down to lock and unlock her stores before most every meal, sometime I reckon she come to the kitchen just so’s not to be upstairs with Marse. Same thing, she work the garden with her India rubber gloves on, I’s a-digging and a-toting and a-watering, days pass. We’uns don’t talk much, we’uns know what we doing.
She open the sugar cupboard, now, there ain’t so much as a hogshead full.
Can’t you order some more, ma’am? I says.
Her breath hiss. I’m afraid the store won’t allow us another thing, with times as they are.
Since the blockade, no cotton’s getting shipped out, port’s quiet like a cemetery. I hear Marse at dinner sometime boasting the damn Yankees ain’t got into none of Texas yet and never will. He sing out, This here’s the last frontier. Planters coming down from Georgia and Virginia with all thems darkies to make a stand.
How much coffee’s left? ask Missus now.
Half a sack.
She give a long sigh.
In these parts four out of five is colored. The buckras, they’s always sniffing out plots among their blacks but there ain’t no trouble in this part of Texas. We’uns just waiting the War out. Passing on what stories we hear tell, sitting tight.
For dinner I roast the last of the gobblers, with ash cakes and corn and the end of the catsup.
Afterwards I’s eating leftovers in the kitchen. Missus come in and start counting the preserves. He means to ride to town with you tomorrow.
That so?
You know why?
No, Ma’am.
Guess, she say, like playing with a chile. I can see her teeth but she ain’t smiling. I shake my head. Guess, she say again.
My collar feel real tight. I been in this house since I was born. Marse won’t do that.
Some might call that back talk but Missus like a straight answer. She come up close, her fingers all tangled. I tell you, I’ve been married to Brown five years come June, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do.
He mean to sell me?
The man said to me just now, That nigger buck’s worth a thousand dollars. She lean on the table. Don’t you see? You’re all he’s got left.
I think I might fall down.
He intends to leave you with a dealer in town tomorrow, buy some calves instead.
That ain’t gone happen. I says it real quiet but I know she hear me.
Missus nod.
Mary? That’s Marse a-shouting for her. She shoot off like a rabbit.
I got a lot to do. I find some old bags in the larder, start filling them. Cornmeal, flour, salt pork mostly. A couple handful of coffee for when I need to stay wake. The littlest pot for boiling.
Missus come back in so quiet I don’t hear her till she touch my elbow, and I jump. She don’t wear no clickety-clackety heels like other missuses. Too late to hide what I’m doing. She could call in Marse and have me whupped for thieving right this minute.
Take this, she whisper, holding up a jar of peaches.
I shake my head. It get broke, I tell her.
She set it down, unlock the sugar cupboard, start a scooping. Where do you plan to run?
Now here’s where I reckon I should seal up my mouth, but Missus, she already done got the noose round my neck. Mexico, I reckon, I says, real soft, or the Arizona Territory.
I’m coming, she say. Like she was talking about a party.
My face is stony. Missus Brown—
That’s not my real name, she remark. I’m only called Brown the same way you are, because of him. She jerk her head upstairs, where Marse’s lying on his’n couch with his’n bottle.
Missus, you talking crazy. You can’t come nowhere along of me.
Well I can’t stay with him, she mutter, still a-scooping the sugar. If I stay in this house another month—
Listen, I start.
I’ll pick up this knife and put an end to it, she say. Her hand be on the handle, skin on bone.
She smiling now, strange. But I know how to sign for him, you see, I’ve practiced. I can sign a travel pass for you with my husband’s name! We’ll go in the carriage, and if patrollers stop us, I’ll say I’m going to visit my family.
I wants to shake her real hard. You think Marse won’t lep up, soon’s he find his bed empty, ride over to Stern’s plantation and put the alarm out?
She chewing on her lip.
They come for us with dogs. They come with irons.
Damn you, she say, eyes shining wet, I can’t—She turn round, she gone into the house.
On my own in the kitchen I gets a-thinking. She ain’t bad, for a white woman. I wouldn’t much mind her coming along. Like she say, take the carriage, show a pass, get farther faster that way. If it wasn’t impossible, it be a good plan.
My mind a-hopping about like a fly. If she could sneak out in the night without Marse knowing. If he sleep long, sleep all night and all day—but no, we’uns need more of a head start than that.
Halfway through the afternoon Missus come in again. Her eyes red but she got a hold of herself.
About supper, I says, before she speak a word.
I don’t give a damn about supper.
I takes a breath, I says, You don’t care for okra, do you? I don’t say Missus.
She shrug.
Okra. It not your favorite.
Well, no. My favorite would be sweet potato, she say, the way you fix it with molasses.
I be sure to fix some sweet potato tonight, just for you.
Do, if you like, say Missus, like some girl.
You be eating that sweet potato instead of that okra.
She look at me again, hard.
Since you don’t care for okra. Specially not the way I’s fixing it tonight.
She don’t say nothing.
I can’t be sure. I don’t know how much to tell her. Marse gonna like it, though. Eat hims fill, bet you he does.
She take a step over to me. What’s in the okra?
Never you mind, I tell her. I’s the cook. Yeah?
I suppose.
So leave the cooking to me.
When she gone I get the rest of supper all fixed and then I make the okra. My heart a going boom-boom. I’s never made it till now but I know how, my pappy teach me. I done pick the stuff in the woods months back, it be always in my charm bag round my neck. There come a moment I feel bad, but I says to myself, Marse mean to leave you with this dealer tomorrow, buy some calves. I taste the okra, just touch it to my tongue to be sure, then stir in more sugar. Marse, he like hims fixings sweet.
I bring in the supper like always. While they eating I wait outside. I think I hear talking, dishes and lids, plates and glasses. After while I don’t hear nothing. Not a word, not a holler. That’s worse. I wait.
This the moment. This’s it. I feels like some blind man. This the time my life split like a peach, and there’s a rotten side and a sweet yellow side, and which it gonna be?
Missus come out. Mary, that her name. I think maybe she gonna scream murder after all. Did we’uns understand each our selves? Did she think hims only going sleep? Or maybe she scared, now it come to it, maybe she say Go.
Instead she put her hand in mine, real cool, smooth. No speaking.
I follow her into the room where Marse lie facedown in the okra. We stand for a little, make sure he not moving none.
Should I clear away? I ask, not sure what I mean, except to get him out of sight.
Missus shake her head. Never mind that.
It should be three, four day before any neighbor think to ride over to Brown’s. Maybe a week. He not a social man.
She turn, look in my face, she say I packed my bag. Her hand like a knot in mine.
Last Supper at Brown’s
A clipping from the Tucson Star, pasted in Scrapbook No. 1 at the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona, records that Negro Brown, aka Nigger Brown, killed his master in Texas in 1864 and “throughout all his wanderings … he was accompanied by his slain master’s wife.”
Susan Johnson, in “Sharing Bed and Board: Cohabitation and Cultural Difference in Central Arizona Mining Towns, 1863–1873” (in The Women’s West, edited by Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, 1987), rounds up various newspaper accounts that suggest the wife in question was Mary Brown, aka Mary DeCrow. The runaways’ romance seems to have lasted no longer than the journey into Arizona. That state’s 1864 census lists “Negro Brown” as living with “Santa Lopez” and a baby, and “Mary Brown,” a forty-two-year-old laundress from Texas, as living with a twenty-nine-year-old Mexican blacksmith called Cornelius Ramos (or Ramez or Reamis). She married Ramos the following year; they ran a boardinghouse, then worked mining claims and set up a goat ranch.
IN TRANSIT
GULF OF SAINT LAWRENCE
1849
COUNTING THE DAYS
Jane Johnson grips the rail of the Riverdale, watching the estuary water heave and sink below her. She reckons the dates: nearly five weeks since she boarded at Belfast, and the city of Québec is only one more day west. The provisions might almost have lasted, if it hadn’t been for the heat and the maggots in the ham. The same journey took Henry eight weeks last year, when the seas were high. Tomorrow she will be beside him.
Today she is beside herself. On this voyage Jane has discovered herself to be a most imperfect creature. For all her weather-dried red hair and her two children, she is restless as a young goat that butts the fence. What has appalled her the most on this little floating world of the Riverdale is not the squalor, nor the hunger, but the dearth of news. No one has left their company, except for that old man who died of dysentery last week. No one has arrived, unless you count a stillbirth down in steerage. The only gossip is the rumble of clouds and the occasional protest of gulls. The passengers have to spend their time guessing what is happening in the real, landlocked world, now split in two for them like an apple, where on one side people weep for them and stare into the horizon that has swallowed them up, and on the other side, others stare back, waiting for the first glimpse of them. Or at least so these passengers must believe. Unless they are longed for, why are they here, cribbed in the rancid belly of this wooden whale?
Jane reaches into her pocket for her cache of letters and loosens the ribbon. They’re too few: crumbs to her appetite. The first, bearing the postmark, Henry didn’t send till he’d been there a fortnight. He wanted to wait till he had good news to tell, something encouraging, he wrote, the eejit, as if she needed any message but his living scribble on the paper, between the edges that are black from a month crossing the Atlantic to her.
Henry Johnson leans against a wall in Montréal. I am thinking great long to see you, his wife says at various points in the creased pages. Her grammar makes him want to slap her, and take her in his arms, and cry.
He should be in the shop, helping with the dinnertime customers, but he had to step out to get a little air. Maybe the sunlight and the long shadows of the trees will settle him. Maybe he is just nervous because of the trip he must take tonight, down the sinewy St. Lawrence to Québec. When he gets back, at the end of the week, it will be with Jane and the little ones: he will be a family man once more.
Dear Henry when you and me meet we will have many an old story to tell each other.
Such weakness is slackening his limbs today. His stomach churns; he leans against the wall. Its timber frame bears the claw marks of last winter’s ice. A carriage clatters by; the crack of the whip rings in Henry’s ears. His nerves are spiders’ webs beneath his skin. Have the months of vagabonding and working hand to mouth taken such a toll? Henry is an older man than the brash grocer who fled Antrim and debts last year. But a stronger one, surely. The bad times are over; he is going to be the husband Jane has always deserved.
She clambered onto the ship at the warm end of May, w
ith Alex behind her, small fists full of her skirt, and Mary heavy on her hip. By the first week in June, the air had thickened. Jane had begged from everyone who shared any of her names to make up the twenty pounds for this cabin. She and the children are sharing it with two aged clergymen. The air is fetid, but anything is better than Antrim. At least on ship she doesn’t have to jam the door against whoever might knock.
In such a famine year it is better not to think about home. The town of Antrim has lidded its eyes. Most of those who are not dead have been evicted; the rest count farthings or starve in private. What overwhelms Jane, when she lets herself dwell on it, is the sense of anticlimax: the Johnsons held themselves together through four years of blight, but where is their happy-ever-after?
Down in the steaming gloom of the cabin, she hunches on the bunk with her eyes squeezed shut, and tries to find her better self. At least they have some bedding, not like some of the passengers, who sleep in the spare sails. Besides, what right has she to make a fuss about leaving for a faraway country when her uncle did it years before her, and her nephew, and her brother, and her two sisters? And her husband. Against her better judgment she let Henry go on ahead; thirteen months without anyone to wash his shirt. What kind of wife is she? She jolts the crying girl on her lap, watching dark water punch the glass circle. What kind of a woman would be more loath to go than to part, more afraid of the crossing than the separation?
Sometimes Henry’s letters are so obstinately cheerful that they hurt her throat. I have had rather a rough time of it, he remarked after the storm off Liverpool. The paper was stiff with salt; the water had spewed in and nearly sunk the ship. Is his bravery a fiction, Jane sometimes wonders? When he wrote to assure her that he had not panicked like the papists who threw holy water on the waves, was it her or himself he was trying to convince? I knew if we were to go down I might as well take it Kindly as not as crying wouldnt help me.