A Light in the Wilderness Read online

“He treat you good?”

  “He a good man. Likes things done a patterned way, but most men does.”

  “Amen to that.” Beulah raised her eyes to the heavens and all three women laughed.

  “Mistus carries a heavy stick but once you learn her ways she good.”

  Cora told her then about where they’d come from, sold out of a good home when their owner died. Beulah leaned in toward Letitia and whispered, “We taught to read and write, and one day we buy our way free. That how you came to be free? Earning your way?”

  “I’s given freedom. But I just beginnin’ to earn my way.”

  “Best we get started.” Cora spoke again. “Where you get the water from? That the woodpile for heatin’ it?” She pointed with her chin. “At least we together, right, Beulah? Got someone to lean on.”

  In that moment Letitia longed to keep working beside them, girls who brought a lightness to their day, made do with what they’d been handed.

  Letitia stopped at the owner’s office, waited outside while he talked with the deliveryman bringing in pickles and wine from off the steamer. As quick as a lamb’s tail her life had changed. But as the girls had said, it was a caution to being free, this unpredictability. Just like the slave girls, others could still make choices for your life even if you planned it out well. She had lots more ways to respond though than those girls. She vowed to make the best of it.

  The owner motioned her inside his office as the drayman left.

  “Hoping the mistus doing better.”

  The owner nodded as he pulled an envelope from the drawer.

  “I’s thinkin’. Maybe you still have need of butter daily. I brings it to you. Might try my hand at cheese too. Fresh is good.”

  The owner handed her the envelope. “No need if we get our own cow.”

  “That so, but then you got your girls milkin’, churnin’ the butter, and you end up with fewer hours for washin’ and cleanin’ and servin’.”

  He was thoughtful. “Bring me two pounds of butter tomorrow and cheese as soon as it’s ready. We’ll see how you fare as a businesswoman. But don’t tell folks, Letitia. Not everyone likes an enterprising woman, especially one who used to be a slave.”

  July danced like a sultry woman, promising clear days and then ending with thunderstorms that didn’t cool. The county filled with travelers like children to a picnic as more folks in wagons came from North Carolina and Kentucky, Iowa, Illinois, all talking of heading to Oregon in the spring. Davey sold beef and cord wood to them and buckets of coal as they found temporary housing to winter over. He boasted over pamphlet messages that made Oregon sound like the Promised Land.

  “It’s the poor market for tobacco and hemp rope bringing them this way, wouldn’t you say?” Davey asked Letitia. He leaned against a fence post using a shredded twig to clean his teeth while Letitia weeded the garden she’d planted.

  Fresh cabbage would be ready before long if the moles left them alone and Letitia could keep Rothwell from digging those holes he liked so well. She sold the produce along with butter and milk to the hotel. Making cheese proved a harder challenge, as she’d never done such a thing. “I’s wishin’ I could make cheese to sell travelers. Got enough milk.”

  “My older brother might know how,” Davey said. “He always kept a few cows and we had cheese in Ireland, as a boy. We can seek him out, if you’ve a mind to.”

  He has brothers? Nearby?

  Her earnings were but a pittance of what they’d been working at the hotel, but no one asked her to serve drinks at night and she found she liked spending more time with this man. Making cheese would add to her purse if she could do it well. And meeting Davey’s brother sounded interesting. She’d see if kindness ran in the Carson blood. “Kind of you to offer.”

  A comfortable silence settled between them.

  Then, “I do wonder what makes a man pull up roots and put wheels beneath him. Don’t you, Tish?” He tossed aside his tooth-picking twig.

  She wasn’t sure what drew people from their homelands to the unknown, what certainty they felt compelled to set aside for the imaginations of a future believed to be somehow in a “better place.” There could be no better place than where one was, and thinking there was bore a hole in a person’s heart. But she supposed people could reinvent themselves, become mellow like old dogs in a new place, leave behind the recklessness of poor thinking. She’d been attempting to leave a past behind while preparing for a future, hadn’t she?

  Davey squatted down to tug at weeds. She must have looked surprised because he squinted up at her and said, “What? Can’t a man work on the greens or is he relegated to hunting rabbits and coons for supper?”

  “My mama said never turn down a helpin’ hand.”

  “Your mama’s a wise woman.”

  “Was.”

  Later that evening Davey blistered his hand on the hot kettle he’d set on the stove to heat so she could wash up the dishes. He yelped like a dog.

  “Here.” Letitia soothed the pain with a poultice of slippery elm she’d brought with her from Kentucky. She ran the salve over his hand with her own, aware of the wound heat and the cool of the poultice.

  “Now that’s a mighty help.” Davey laid his good palm atop hers.

  It was the first time he’d ever touched her ’cept for helping her onto the pillion. A candle flickered over their hands and Letitia allowed the calloused fingers to cluck like a hen’s feathering safety over hers. No demand. No expectation like some men she’d served. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt a man’s touch without a hint of harm. Letitia let Davey’s hand cluck for a bit, then she pulled back. Davey didn’t grab her wrist nor persist. Instead he coughed, thanked her for the poultice, and didn’t look into her eyes for some days after that.

  Davey watched Letitia move through the shanty shack he’d built with his own hands, fixing supper. Her hips swayed as she brought molasses from the larder, her slender frame belying the strength he’d seen as she chopped wood or weeded the garden for hours on end. She kept herself tidy and smelled of lavender and coconut, though he didn’t know why. She never complained, said more than once she was grateful for his letting her and the cow stay. What she didn’t say but he suspected is that she felt safe with him. He wasn’t sure she should feel that way. If she knew what he’d done on patrol—picking up colored men and under orders lashing them to within an inch of their lives for being someplace where the patrollers didn’t think they should be—well, if she knew that, she might not put him on a safe shelf. But he had never pushed her to treat him like he owned her. G.B. Smith was one who assumed he’d taken advantage of her and would think him a dolt for not having done so.

  There was something about her that kept him from assuming she’d stay if he tried to bed her, and he realized he didn’t want her to go. On Sundays he felt a twinge of emptiness, like drinking the last drop of a good cup of coffee, when he watched her walk down the road to the Baptist Negro church. She stayed later to sing, she told him, when the slaves were allowed. He didn’t fill up again until he heard her swaying down the lane singing in that husky voice of hers. He liked her cooking and, yes, her kindness, the way she tended women in their birthing. He didn’t want to lose any of this comfort he’d found in her presence.

  “What you lookin’ at, Mistah Carson?”

  “Meself? Oh, nothing.” He leaned back in the hickory chair.

  “Don’t you harsh on me, now.” She teased him with smiling eyes.

  He would like to bed her one day, but he suspected she’d want it done proper and that couldn’t be, the laws being what they were. No colored could marry a white man. Seemed a shame to him, that separating for no good reason. Her heart appeared to be the same color as his. He rose and went out to talk to the dog. He’d have to make sure he kept his distance yet stay close enough to ensure she didn’t go away.

  The August heat made her skin hot to the touch. She sat outside mending a tear in her tow linen, the frogs chirping their opinio
ns that no one listened to. Charity had dried up getting ready to calve, so they’d made the trip north to see Davey’s brother about cheese. She thought of that trip now, how Davey had spoken so little of the years between their meeting, how his brother had grunted at the sight of him and said in passing how disappointed he was in Davey for “doing like you did.”

  “I’m here now. Wondering if you’d advise me on cheese-making. Got meself a neat cow giving milk enough for butter and cheese.”

  Letitia hadn’t corrected him about who owned the cow. Getting the information was what mattered.

  And Smith Carson had shared what he knew, spoke of how to use the fourth stomach of a cow when butchered, how to dry the rennet in strips, and how much to use for each batch of cheese. What they ate of Smith’s cheese was tasty. Letitia thought she could experiment with salt and maybe herbs, and would.

  “Brought your slave along, I see.”

  Smith was a bigger man than Davey. He looked older than his years and not well, his skin the color of dusk. His own slave—she thought it was his slave—brought cooled water for them after they’d finished with instructions. The man looked into Letitia’s eyes as he served her sitting on the steps while the men rocked on the porch above. She felt sorrow and guilt.

  “She’ll do the cheese-making so figured she should see it firsthand.”

  “Hope she’s got a better memory than yours, little brother. You’re prone to forget important things.”

  “I’ve got confidence in her.”

  Letitia heard tension in their words, wondered what important things Davey had misplaced, what eelish darkness slithered beneath the surface of this family. Or any family. They’d left with Smith giving Davey two sizes of firkin, wooden barrels in which to transport the cheese. They smelled of salt and scalded milk.

  “Ouch!” Letitia poked herself with her sewing needle. She was back on Davey’s porch, still listening to the frogs talk.

  Charity decided to calve in the heat, starting late afternoon. “It’s a good time of year,” Davey told Letitia. “Calf’ll be strong to get through the winter without trouble.” But the cow labored well into the night, and even after the calf dropped to the hard ground, the afterbirth hung from the mother.

  “’Spect we’d best get Charity up and tend to that,” Davey said.

  They stood outside the rail corral, Davey swinging the lantern to circle the light. Charity licked her newborn in spurts, bellowing as she swung around, mucous and blood staining her legs these hours after giving birth. The calf stood and sucked, a good sign, but Charity didn’t allow him enough time before she began prancing and pacing. Davey moved then to tie up the cow that resisted being led into the barn. The calf straddle-legged its way behind its mother, bleating like a lost kitten. Letitia followed them inside.

  The work was messy with warm hands inside the cow feeling what to pull and what to push back in. Charity shifted on her legs, turned and twisted but then tired, and Letitia and Davey accomplished what they’d set out to do, watched as the calf sucked.

  Yellow streaks of sunrise greeted them when they washed up side by side at the wooden stand outside the house, splashing water up to their elbows from the tin bowl, blood staining the water red. Letitia handed Davey a towel. She could hear Rothwell digging and yelping his rabbit cry in the woods behind them.

  “Thank you.” She kept scrubbing. “Good to have help.”

  “’Spect so.” He cleared his throat, leaned against the porch post while still wiping his upper arms, sleeves rolled up. “I know there’s no way of marrying ye,” he said.

  “What?” Moisture formed on her upper lip. “Are you harshin’ on me?” She kept her back to him, hands deep in the washbowl. She fingered a chipped place at the bottom.

  “Lookee. I know there’s no way of legally marrying ye, you being colored. But I wish there was. I know I’m old as those bluffs up there, but I feel a younger man around you. Able to get things done, and it’s good to have a woman noticing that a man is still accomplishing. Things.”

  She turned toward him, hands trembling.

  “Oh, I’ve scared you. Didn’t mean to do that.” He handed her the towel he’d used.

  She knew her eyes must look like chestnuts in cream. Her life with him had been an easy comfort, but now . . . Maybe I should have gone west with the Bowmans.

  “Mistah Carson—”

  “I’m Davey to you.” He cleared his throat, rushed into her hesitation. “I know that on the plantations a Negro man has to ask permission to take a wife, and then there’s all the talk about the ‘issue’ and who that child will belong to, the owner of the man or the mother’s master.”

  Letitia stood still as a rabbit with a hawk hovering above. She was startled by his awareness of what humiliation it was for a man to risk the loss of his children once they were born. Every man wanted to protect his wife and children, didn’t he? She swallowed, kept wiping her arms though they were dry as tinder.

  “That ain’t much of a way for a man or a woman to live. In the territory, here, before the Platte Purchase had good, principled people living in it, marriage came by, well, someone saying good words over a man and his Pawnee wife or a senorita he brought up from old Mexico. No priests or pastors around. Just like it ain’t allowed here, being as how you’re . . . and I’m . . . well, our . . . we’re different.”

  It was the longest span of speech Davey had ever made to her. He wasn’t finished.

  “I don’t know what it would take for you to feel married to me. Be easier to keep you safe in Oregon if you and I . . . belonged to each other.”

  She turned, raised that eyebrow.

  “Lookee here.” He tugged on his beard. “In Oregon you’d not have to worry about folks questioning your status, free or . . .” He looked away.

  “You can say the word, Mistah Carson.”

  He wagged his finger in front of a smile that showed a broken eyetooth.

  “Davey,” she agreed to call him. “You can say ‘slave.’ I ain’t one, though I was, and yes it tainted who I is, but I’s free, always was even when owned. Free in my thinkin’. Free as a child of God.”

  “Consider my proposal then, free-thinking woman.” He gave a high-pitched laugh that she hadn’t heard before.

  He’s nervous. It made her face grow warm. “Your proposal? Your offer.”

  “Call it what you will. I offer my name if you choose it, free and clear and a promise to be your husband as best I can. God willing.” He cleared his throat. “Think on it, would you? I gotta go chop more wood.”

  Letitia watched him walk away. He tripped on the step, caught himself. She grabbed her straw hat and headed for the hotel with spring-cooled butter and a basketful of thoughts burdening her narrow shoulders.

  Later that day while she heated the tub of steaming water to wash linen sheets, she thought of Davey’s offer. There was no love in it, but kindness. And shelter and safe-guarding, which might be stepping stones to something deeper. His power didn’t rain down like hail. He’d been generous in allowing the exchange of her work and a place to sleep in return for the grazing and had not taken any money from her milk and butter, kale and carrot sales to the hotel. He’d been fair with her. Just. That too was a stepping stone to love, wasn’t it? She had not loved her children’s two fathers. They’d taken her. Later one sold his own child away from her. Nathan had died so young, and God forgive, at least she didn’t have to see him grow to be beaten or sold.

  She sank the laundry stick deep into the blob of cloth, the hickory bent with the weight. Was child-bearing a part of his offer? He hadn’t said. She should be pleased enough that he proposed marriage rather than assuming she was his for the taking. And he did ask her opinion of things, which she described as a kind of respect, something else she thought necessary for love to follow. And who was she anyway to assume love would be a part of any pairing in her life. It had not been a part of her mother’s. Love was a dessert. Not everyone was blessed with such earthly sweetn
ess.

  She wished she had a woman to talk to. The pastor’s wife at the Baptist church who braided her hair, she might lend an ear. But subverting the law by acting married rather than owned could put those who knew of it in trouble. She hung the sheets on the line, thought of Sarah Bowman as the wind snapped the wetness against her face. Sarah would curl her nose up at the very idea of matching a white man to a colored woman and sniff at the thought there could be love between them. There’d been plenty of white men who took wenches; they could never be joined in God’s eyes. But if love was there, then couldn’t such a marriage one day be? Marriages were arranged all the time by owners and sometimes love flourished. Look at Robin and Polly Holmes. They’d been mated by a master but love grew where only commerce had been intended and they’d had six children together. She wondered how they fared on the trail to Oregon, how they must have grieved leaving their three children behind. But their owner had promised them freedom if Robin helped him prove up his Oregon claim. The promise of freedom could be a balm to grief. It would be a balm to uncertainty too.

  Letitia pressed wooden pins over the sheet corners. Birds chirped and she heard a playful bark of Rothwell among the trees.

  If she accepted Davey’s offer, they’d head west. If she stayed, she’d have an uncertain road. Even though she earned money, she’d never be able to purchase his farm and have the safety of a shelter of her own, not in Missouri. Not in any slave state. Maybe one day somewhere free. And G.B. Smith would haunt her if she walked the roads at night. She’d heard of men carrying free papers who had been kidnapped, sold, the patrollers keeping the coins after destroying the papers and sending the free black into slavery. But in Oregon Davey could find new land. If he was a citizen. Maybe she could get free land too? She scoffed to herself at that. She’d always be at the mercy of people who saw her as property rather than her being able to buy property. If she bought another cow she’d have to get someone to buy it for her, as no one would trust that she hadn’t stolen the money.