“You realize what you’re asking them, don’t you?” said Peggy. “Everybody’s going to think somebody else has been plowing with Mr. Berry’s heifer.”
Mama looked so surprised Peggy almost laughed out loud. “I didn’t think Blacks cared about such things,” she said.
Peggy shook her head. “Mama, the Berrys are just about the best Christians in Hatrack River. They have to be, to keep forgiving the way White folks treat them and their children.”
Mama closed the door again and stood inside, leaning on it. “How
do
folks treat their children?”
It was a pertinent question, Peggy knew, and Mama had thought of it only just in time. It was one thing to look at that scrawny fussing little Black baby and say, I’m going to take care of this child and save his life. It was something else again to think of him being five and seven and ten and seventeen years old, a young buck living right there in the house.
“I don’t think you have to fret about that,” said Little Peggy, “not half so much as how
you
plan to treat this boy. Do you plan to raise him up to be your servant, a lowborn child in your big fine house? If that’s so, then this girl died for nothing, she might as well have let them sell him south.”
“I never hankered for no slave,” said Mama. “Don’t you go saying that I did.”
“Well, what then? Are you going to treat him as your own son, and stand with him against all comers, the way you would if you’d ever borne a son of your own?”
Peggy watched as Mama thought of that, and suddenly she saw all kinds of new paths open up in Mama’s heartfire. A son—that’s what this half-White boy could be. And if folks around here looked cross-eyed at him on account of him not being all White, they’d have to reckon with Margaret Guester, they would, and it’d be a fearsome day for them, they’d have no terror at the thought of hell, not after what she’d put them through.
Mama hadn’t felt such a powerful grim determination in all the years Peggy’d been looking into her heart. It was one of those times when somebody’s whole future changed right before her eyes. All the old paths had been pretty much the same; Mama had no choices that would change her life. But now, this dying girl had brought a transformation. Now there were hundreds of new paths open, and all of them had a little boy-child in them, needing her the way her daughter’d never needed her. Set upon by strangers, cruelly treated by the boys of the town, he’d come to her again and again for protection, for teaching, for toughening, the kind of thing that Peggy’d never done.
That’s why I disappointed you, wasn’t it, Mama? Cause I knew too much, too young. You wanted me to come to you in my confusion, with my questions. But I never had no questions, Mama, cause I knew from childhood up. I knew what it meant to be a woman from the memories in your own head. I knew about married love without you telling me. I never had a tearful night pressed up against your shoulder, crying cause some boy I longed for wouldn’t look at me; I never longed for any boy around here. I never did a thing you dreamed your little girl would do, cause I had a torch’s knack, and I knew everything and needed nothing that you wanted to give me.
But this half-Black boy, he’ll need you no matter what his knack might be. I see down all those paths, that if you take him in, if you raise him up. he’ll be more son to you than I ever was your daughter, though your blood is half of mine.
“Daughter,” said Mama, “if I go through this door, will it turn out well for the boy? And for us, too?”
“Are you asking me to See for you, Mama?”
“I am, Tittle Peggy, and I never asked for that before, never on my own behalf.”
“Then I’ll tell you.” Peggy hardly needed to look far down the paths of Mama’s life to find how much pleasure she’d have in the boy. “If you take him in, and treat him like your own son, you’ll never regret doing it.”
“What about your papa? Will he treat him right?”
“Don’t you know your own husband?” asked Peggy.
Mama walked a step toward her, her hand all clenched up even
though she never laid a hand on Peggy. “Don’t get fresh with me,” she said.
“I’m talking the way I talk when I See,” said Peggy. “You come to me as a torch, I talk as a torch to you.”
“Then say what you have to say.”
“It’s easy enough. If you don’t know how your husband will treat this boy, you don’t know that man at all.”
“So maybe I don’t,” said Mama. “Maybe I don’t know him at all. Or maybe I do, and I want you to tell me if I’m right.”
“You’re right,” said Peggy. “He’ll treat him fair, and make him feel loved all the days of his life.”
“But will he really love him?”
There wasn’t no chance that Peggy’d answer that question. Love wasn’t even in the picture for Papa. He’d take care of the boy because he ought to, because he felt a bounden duty, but the boy’d never know the difference, it’d feel like love to him, and it’d be a lot more dependable than love ever was. But to explain that to Mama would mean telling her how Papa did so many things because he felt so bad about his ancient sins, and there’d never be a time in Mama’s life when she was ready to hear
that
tale.
So Peggy just looked at Mama and answered her the way she answered other folks who pried too deep into things they didn’t really want to know. “That’s for him to answer,” Peggy said. “All you need to know is that the choice you already made in your heart is a good one. Already just deciding that has changed your life.”
“But I haven’t even decided yet,” said Mama.
In Mama’s heart there wasn’t a single path left, not a single one, in which she didn’t get the Berrys to say it was their boy, and leave him with her to raise.
“Yes you have,” said Peggy. “And you’re glad of it.”
Mama turned and left, closing the door gentle behind her, so as not to wake the traveling preacher who was sleeping in the room upstairs of the door.
Peggy had just one moment’s unease, and she wasn’t even sure why. If she’d thought about it a minute, she’d have known it was on account of how she cheated her Mama without even knowing
it. When Peggy did a Seeing for anybody else, she always took care to look far down the paths of their life, looking for darkness from causes not even guessed at. But Peggy was so sure she knew her Mama and Papa, she didn’t even bother looking except at what was coming up right away. That’s how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don’t bother hardly getting to know each other at all. It wouldn’t be years yet till Peggy would think back on this day, and try to figure why she didn’t See what was coming. Sometimes she’d even imagine that her knack failed her. But it didn’t. She failed her own knack. She wasn’t the first to do so, nor the last, nor even the worst, but there’s few ever lived to regret it more.
The moment of unease passed, and Peggy forgot it as her thoughts turned to the Black girl on the common-room floor. She was awake, her eyes open. The baby was still mewling. Without the girl saying a thing, Peggy knew she was willing for the babe to suckle, if she had anything in her breasts to suck on out. The girl hadn’t even strength to open up her faded cotton shirt. Peggy had to sit beside her, cradling the child against her own thighs while she fumbled the girl’s buttons open with her free hand. The girl’s chest was so skinny, her ribs so stark and bare, that her breasts looked to be saddlebags tossed onto a rail fence. But the nipple still stood up for the baby to suck, and a white froth soon appeared around the baby’s lips, so there was something there, even now, even at the very end of his mama’s life.
The girl was far too weak to talk, but she didn’t need to; Peggy heard what she wanted to say, and answered her. “My own mama’s going to keep your boy,” said Peggy. “And no wise is she going to let any man make a slave of him.”
That was what the girl wanted most to hear—that and the sound of her greedy boy-baby slurping and humming and squealing at her breast.
But Peggy wanted her to know more than that before she died. “Your boy-baby’s going to know about you,” she told the girl. “He’s going to hear how you gave your life so you could fly away and take
him here to freedom. Don’t you think he’ll ever forget you, cause he won’t.”
Then Peggy looked into the child’s heartfire, searched there for what he’d be. Oh, that was a painful thing, because the life of a half-White boy in a White town was hard no matter which of the paths of his life he chose. Still, she saw enough to know the nature of the babe whose fingers scratched and clutched at his mama’s naked chest. “And he’ll be a man worth dying for, too, I promise you that.”
The girl was glad to hear it. It brought her peace enough that she could sleep again. After a time the babe, satisfied, also fell asleep. Peggy picked him up, wrapped him in a blanket, and laid him in the crook of his mama’s arm. Every last moment of your mama’s life you’ll be with her, she told the boychild silently. We’ll tell you that, too, that she held you in her arms when she died.
When she died. Papa was out with Po Doggly, digging her grave; Mama was off at the Berrys, to persuade them to help her save the baby’s life and freedom; and here was Peggy, thinking as if the girl was already dead.
But she wasn’t dead, not yet. And all of a sudden it came to Peggy, with a flash of anger that she was too stupid to think of it before, that there was one soul she knew of who had the knack in him to heal the sick. Hadn’t he knelt by Ta-Kumsaw at the battle of Detroit, that great Red man’s body riddled with bullet holes, hadn’t Alvin knelt there and healed him up? Alvin could save this girl, if he was here.
She cast off in the darkness, searching for the heartfire that burned so bright, the heartfire she knew better than any in the world, better even than her own. And there he was, running in the darkness, traveling the way Red men did, like he was asleep, and the land around him was his soul. He was coming faster than any White could ever come, even with the fastest horse on the best road between the Wobbish and the Hatrack, but he wouldn’t be here till noon tomorrow, and by then this runaway slavegirl would be dead and in the ground up in the family graveyard. By twelve hours at most she’d miss the one man in this country who could have saved her life.
Wasn’t that the way of it? Alvin could save her, but he’d never
know she needed saving While Peggy, who couldn’t do a thing, she knew all that was happening, knew all the things that might happen, knew the one thing that
should
happen if the world was good. It wasn’t good. It wouldn’t happen.
What a terrible gift it was, to be a torch, to know all these things a-coming, and have so little power to change them. The only power she’d ever had was just the words of her mouth, telling folks, and even then she couldn’t be sure what they’d choose to do. Always there’d be some choice they could make that would set them down a path even worse than the one she wanted to save them from—and so many times in their wickedness or cantankerousness or just plain bad luck, they’d make that terrible choice and then things’d be worse for them than if Peggy’d just kept still and never said a thing. I wish I didn’t know. I wish I had some hope that Alvin would come in time. I wish I had some hope this girl would live. I wish that I could save her life myself.
And then she thought of the many times she
had
saved a life. Alvin’s life, using Alvin’s caul. At that moment hope
did
spark up in her heart, for surely, just this once, she could use a bit of the last scrap of Alvin’s caul to save this girl, to restore her.
Peggy leapt up and ran clumsily to the stairs, her legs so numb from sitting on the floor that she couldn’t hardly feel her own footsteps on the bare wood. She tripped on the stairs and made some noise, but none of the guests woke up, as far as she noticed right off like that. Up the stairs, then up the attic ladderway that Oldpappy made into a proper stairway not three months afore he died. She threaded her way among the trunks and old furniture until she reached her room up against the west end of the house. Moonlight came in through her south-facing window, making a squared-off pattern on the floor. She pried up the floorboard and took the box from the place where she hid it whenever she left the room.
She walked too heavy or this one guest slept too light, but as she came down the ladderway. there he stood, skinny white legs sticking out from under his longshirt, a-gazing down the stairs, then back toward his room, like as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to go in or out, up or down. Peggy looked into his heartfire, just to find
out whether he’d been downstairs and seen the girl and her baby—if he had, then all their thought and caution had been in vain.
But he hadn’t—it was still possible.
“Why are you still dressed for going out?” he asked. “At this time of the morning, too?”
She gently laid her finger against his lips. To silence him, or at least that’s how the gesture began. But she knew right away that she was the first woman ever to touch this man upon the face since his mama all those many years ago. She saw that in that moment his heart filled, not with lust, but with the vague longings of a lonely man. He was the minister who’d come day before yesterday morning, a traveling preacher—from Scotland, he said. She’d hardly paid him no mind, her being so preoccupied with knowing Alvin was on his way back. But now all that mattered was to send him back into his room, quick as could be, and she knew one sure way to do it. She put her hands on his shoulders, getting a strong grip behind his neck, and pulled him down to where she could kiss him fair on the lips. A good long buss, like he never had from a woman in all his days.