The Invention of Wings: A Novel (24 page)

“Whatever they do to the least of them, they do it unto me,” he said.

I thought to myself,
Mr. Vesey fancies himself like Jesus carrying the cross, and that’s probably cause he doesn’t have five dollars on him for the fine
. Knowing him, though, he could’ve been throwing his lot with the rest of us. The man was big-headed and proud, but he had a heart.

When we got to the gallery and looked over the rail at the torment waiting for us, we just folded up and sat down on the floor.

One of the overseers fastened Mr. Vesey’s chain to an iron ring and told us to watch the wheel careful so we’d know what to do. The mauma with the baby on her back said to him, “Who gon watch my baby while I down there?”

He said, “You think we got people to tend your baby?”

I had to turn from her, the way her head dropped, the baby looking wide-eye over her shoulder.

The treadmill was a spinning drum, twice as tall as a man, with steps on it. Twelve scrambling people were climbing it fast as they could go, making the wheel turn. They clung to a handrail over the top of it, their wrists lashed to it in case their grip slipped. The mill groaned and the corn cracked underneath. Two black-skin overseers paced with cowhides—cat o’nine tails, they called them—and when the wheel slowed, they hit the backs and legs of those poor people till you saw pink flesh ripple.

Mr. Vesey’s good eye studied me. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“From the church.”

“No, somewhere else.”

I could’ve spit the truth out, but we were both in Daniel’s lion’s den, and God had left us to it. I said, “Where’s all that delivering God’s supposed to do?”

He snorted. “You’re right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn’t have any hands and feet but ours.”

“That doesn’t say much for the Lord.”

“It doesn’t say much for us, either.”

A bell rang down below and the jaws on the wheel stopped chewing. The overseers loosed the people’s wrists and they climbed down a ladder to the floor. Some of them were so used-up they had to be dragged off.

The overseer unlocked Mr. Vesey from the floor ring. “Get on your feet. It’s your turn.”

H
andful’s mangled foot was propped on a pillow, and Aunt-Sister was laying a plantain leaf across the wound. From the smell that drifted in the air, I knew her injury had been freshly plastered with potash and vinegar.

“Miss Sarah’s here now,” Aunt-Sister said. Handful’s head rolled side to side on the mattress, but her eyes stayed closed. She’d been heavily sedated with laudanum, the apothecary already come and gone.

I blinked to keep tears away—it was the sight of her lying there maimed, but some of my anguish came from guilt. I didn’t know she’d been arrested, that Mother had decided to let her suffer the consequences in the Work House. I hadn’t even missed Handful’s presence. This would never have happened if I hadn’t returned Handful’s ownership to Mother. I’d known Handful would be worse off with her, and I’d given her back anyway. That awful self-righteousness of mine.

Sabe had brought Handful home in the carriage while I’d been away at Bible study.
Bible study.
I felt shame to think of myself, probing verses in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians—
Though I have all knowledge and all faith, and have not charity, I am nothing.

I forced myself to look across the bed at Aunt-Sister. “How bad is it?”

She answered by peeling back the green leaf so I could see for myself. Handful’s foot was twisted inward at an unnatural angle and there was a gash running from her ankle to the small toe, exposing raw flesh. A row of bright blood beaded through the poultice. Aunt-Sister dabbed it with a towel before smoothing the leaf back in position.

“How did this happen?” I asked.

“They put her on the treadmill, say she fell off and her foot went under the wheel.”

A sketch of the newly installed monstrosity had appeared in the
Mercury
recently with the caption,
A More Resourceful Reprimand
. The article speculated it would earn five hundred dollars profit for the city the first year.

“The apothecary say the foot ain’t broken,” Aunt-Sister said. “The cords that hold the bones are torn up, and she gon be cripple now, I can tell from looking at it.”

Handful moaned, then muttered something that came out slurred and indistinguishable. I took her hand in mine, startled by how slight it felt, wondering how her foot hadn’t crumbled to dust. She looked small lying there, but she was no longer childlike. Her hair was cut ragged an inch from her head. Little sags drooped beneath her eyes. Her forehead was pleated with frown-lines. She’d aged into a tiny crone.

Her lids fluttered, but didn’t open, as she attempted again to speak. I bent close to her lips.

“Go away,” she hissed.
“Go. Away.”

Later I would tell myself her mind was addled with opiates. She couldn’t have known what she was saying. Or perhaps she’d been referring to her own desire to go away.

Handful didn’t leave her room for ten days. Aunt-Sister and Phoebe carried her meals and tended her foot, and Goodis always seemed to linger by the back steps, waiting for news, but I stayed away, fearing her words had been for me after all.

The ban on Father’s study had never been lifted and I rarely set foot there, but while Handful convalesced, I slipped in and took two books—
Pilgrim’s Progress
by Bunyan and Shakespeare’s
The Tempest,
a sea adventure I thought she would especially like—and left them at her door, knocking and hurrying away.

On the morning Handful emerged, we Grimkés were having breakfast in the dining room. There were only four children who hadn’t yet married or gone off to school: Charles, Henry, Nina, and of course myself, the red-headed maiden aunt of the family. Mother was seated at the head of the table with the hinged silk screen directly behind her, its hand-painted jasmine all but haloing her head. She turned to the window, and I saw her mouth part in surprise. There was Handful. She was crossing the work yard toward the oak, using a wooden cane too tall for her. She maneuvered awkwardly, thrusting herself forward, dragging her right foot.

“She’s walking!” cried Nina.

I pushed back my chair and left the table with Nina chasing after me.

“You’re not excused!” Mother called.

We didn’t so much as turn our heads in her direction.

Handful stood beneath the budding tree on a patch of emerald moss. There were drag marks in the dirt from her foot, and I found myself stepping over them as if they were sacrosanct. As we approached, she began to wind fresh red thread around the trunk. I couldn’t imagine what this odd practice meant. It’d been going on, though, for years.

Nina and I waited while she pulled a pair of shears from her pocket and cut away the faded old thread. Several pink strands clung to the bark, and as she plucked at them, her cane slipped and she grabbed the tree to catch herself.

Nina picked up the cane and handed it to her. “Does it hurt?”

Handful looked past Nina at me. “Not all that much now.”

Nina squatted unselfconsciously to inspect the way Handful’s foot pigeoned inward, the odd hump that had formed across the top of it, how she’d fitted a shoe over it by trimming the opening and leaving off the lace.

“I’m sorry for what happened,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I read what I could of the books you brought. They gave me something to do beside lay there.”

“Can I touch your foot?” Nina asked.

“Nina,”
I said, then suddenly understood—here was the nightmare she’d dreamed about since she was a child, here was the hidden horror of the Work House.

Maybe Handful understood, too, her need to confront it. “I don’t mind,” she said.

Nina traced her finger along a crusting scar that flamed across Handful’s skin. Silence jelled around us, and I looked up at the leaves feathering on the branches like little ferns. I could feel Handful looking at me.

“Is there anything you need?” I asked.

She laughed. “
There anything I need?
Well, let’s see now.” Her eyes were hard as glass, burning yellow.

She’d borne a cruelty I couldn’t imagine, and she’d come through it scathed, the scar much deeper than her disfigured foot. What I’d heard in her ruthless laugh was a kind of radicalizing. She seemed suddenly dangerous, the way her mother had been dangerous. But Handful was more considering and methodical than her mother ever was, and warier, too, which made it more worrying. A wave of prescience washed over me, a hint of darkness coming, and then it was gone. I said to her, “I just meant—”

“I know what it is you meant,” she said, and her tone had mellowed. The anger in her face left, and I thought for a moment she might cry, a sight I’d never witnessed, not even when her mother disappeared.

Instead, she turned and made her way toward the kitchen house, her body listing heavily to the left. The determination in her pained me almost as much as her lameness, and it wasn’t until Nina wrapped her arm around my waist and tugged that I realized I was listing with her.

Some days later, Cindie knocked at my door with a note, ordering me to the first-floor piazza, where Mother retreated most afternoons to catch the breezes. It was unusual for her to write out her summons, but Cindie had grown abnormally forgetful, wandering into rooms unable to recall why she was there, bringing Mother a hairbrush instead of a pillow, an array of queer errors that I knew would soon convince Mother to replace her with someone younger.

As I made my way down the stairs, it occurred to me for the first time she might also replace Handful, whose resourcefulness and ability to walk to the market for fabric and supplies was now in question. I paused on the landing, the portrait of the Fates leering, as always, and my stomach gave a lurch of dread. Could this be the reason Mother had summoned me?

Though it was early in May, the heat had moved in with its soaking humidity. Mother sat in the swing and tried to cool herself with her ivory fan. She didn’t wait for me to sit. “We’ve seen no progress in your father’s condition for over a year. His tremors are growing worse by the day and there’s no more that can be done for him here.”

“What are you telling me? Is he—”

“No, just listen. I’ve spoken with Dr. Geddings and we’re in agreement—the only course left is to take him to Philadelphia. There’s a surgeon there of renown, a Dr. Philip Physick. I wrote to him recently and he has agreed to see your father.”

I lowered myself into a porch chair.

“He will go by ship,” she said. “It will be an exacting trip for him, and it’s likely he’ll have to remain up north through the summer, or as long as it takes to find a cure, but the plan has brought him hope.”

I nodded. “Well, yes, of course. He should do everything possible.”

“I’m pleased you feel that way. You’ll be the one to accompany him.”

I leapt to me feet. “Me? Surely you can’t mean I’m to take Father to Philadelphia by myself. What about Thomas or John?”

“Be reasonable, Sarah. They cannot leave their professions and families so easily.”

“And I can?”

“Do I need to point out you have no profession or family to care for? You live under your father’s roof. Your duty is to him.”

Caring for Father week after week, possibly for months, all alone in a faraway place—I felt the life drain out of me.

“But I can’t leave—” I was going to say,
I can’t leave Nina,
but thought better of it.

“I will see to Nina, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

She smiled, such a rare thing. The memory of being in the drawing room with the rector swept back to me: Mother’s cold stare as I defended Nina’s right to follow her conscience. I hadn’t taken her warning seriously enough:
As long as the two of you are under the same roof, there is little hope for Angelina. …
It hadn’t been Nina whom Mother meant to remove. It had been I.

“You leave in three days,” she said.

M
auma pretended a limp, and I got the real one. I used her old wood cane, but it came up to my chest—more like a crutch than a cane.